


chance physics

by ryyves



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Domestic, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Marriage, Marriage Proposal, Mental Illness, Outing, Romantic Drama, Sammy has a cat, Sibling Love, Sibling conflict, There is absolutely a kid involved, They're in their 20s in New York, for a later chapter, past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23795539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: “Jack,” says Sammy at last, and Jack feels it rumble through his ribs, feels Sammy’s breath hot through his t-shirt. “Why do you want a kid?”“Because I love you,” Jack whispers, “and I want to give you the world.”[The About Time AU nobody asked for.]
Relationships: Jack Wright & Lily Wright, Sammy Stevens/Jack Wright
Comments: 25
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this one for a while and I'm excited to share it with you. If you haven't seen About Time, it's on American Netflix right now and it is the sweetest time travel story about love and family and appreciating every moment. You do not have to know About Time to understand this.

Jack meets Sammy Stevens in the dark. It’s this ludicrous escape room he’d roped Lily into, to which she had finally conceded just to stop his nagging. Lily is the only person Jack knows in the room, all of them between seventeen and thirty, and one-by-one they are asked to put their phones into a bucket without explanation.

Halfway through their allotted time, the lights go out. Chaos crashes through the room, voices raised loud and frantic in the dark, bodies slamming into each other or the floor. Jack illuminates his watch, and it casts just enough blue light that he can see the shape of a puzzle box on the center table.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” says Lily’s voice by Jack’s ear, and he jumps.

“Calm down,” Jack whispers. “I’m sure this was part of the plan.”

“Well, duh,” she says. “I know these things aren’t set up for us to win.”

“I have, like, a cat laser,” says a voice. The voice is rich and soft and sweet, wavering as if he’s not sure of the value of his offering, or not sure of himself.

“Okay, genius, that’s really going to help us see—” says somebody else, high-school rough.

“The keyhole, maybe,” Jack interjects, compelled to stand up for the voice before it can be silenced. High on the wall, the clock ticks down their time.

Despite the endless river of bodies in the room, Jack keeps listening for that voice, tracking it through the puzzle pieces behind his eyelids. They feel blindly, finding boxes and bodies with no way to differentiate them.

And they run out of time, of course. Despite it, a cheer goes up when the door opens from outside and light spills in.

They collect their phones, Lily lost somewhere in the crowd ahead of Jack. Right behind him, someone is saying, “But of course I never heard back, because, hey, that’s the story of my life,” and it’s the man with the cat light, his voice sweet as anything. Jack almost misses the box of phones when he reaches down. The crush of bodies presses against him.

“So you keep trying,” says another voice, higher and quicker with emotion. “New York’s – there’s a lot of people, it’s like the talent capital of the world, but you’re _good,_ Sammy, you’re really good. Anyone who doesn’t want you on their show is missing out.”

“That was in college,” says Sammy. “And, well, back home.”

“Forget about home,” his companion insists.

Jack heads toward the door—he’s lost track of Lily, and even if she’s miffed about the working with other people part of the escape room, she’s his ride—but he can still hear Sammy and Ben. He lingers by the door, deliberating, and turns his phone on.

If only he could introduce himself. If only there were a world where that could happen to him. The voices draw nearer, and Jack ducks his head.

“It sounded better in my head, being a big-city radio personality.”

His companion says, “Don’t knock yourself down."

They pass by next to Jack, and he looks up. The shorter of the two men behind him looks barely out of college, or maybe still in college, his tangled hair hanging into his eyes. His hands are still in motion, and he grins at Jack like it’s instinctual.

Jack says, “You work in radio?”

“What?”

“I was right in front of you, and I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“Want to work in radio,” the tall stranger corrects. Sammy. The dim light from the intersection between the room and the streetlights outside cast him in an orange as rich as a sunset.

Jack stares at him, his tongue heavy in his mouth. In the dim light outside the escape room, he is gorgeous. His hair frames his face, a gentle dirty blonde, half of it gathered back behind his head, his sad eyes a blue that could rival the ocean. He wears a loose v-neck that shows the definition of his collarbones and an unzipped winter jacket despite the spring outside and the heat in the building. He’s turning his phone over between his hands, not looking at it.

There is something in his face that’s almost fragile, something fierce as a fire.

“That’s funny,” says Jack. “I produce radio.”

“Really?” When he smiles, his eyes crinkle up, and Jack has to force himself not to stare.

“Yeah, uh. For a couple of years, including in college. I’m Jack.”

“Sammy. My pipsqueak of a friend is Ben.”

Ben’s expression changes in a heartbeat. “That is not fair, and you know it.”

Sammy directs a shit-eating grin at Ben and ruffles his hair, and something quiet aches inside Jack, something he doesn’t dare let breathe.

“It’s a pleasure,” says Jack, knowing it’s old-fashioned or overeager but meaning it.

They exit the building together and stand at the bottom of the steps while the crowd parts around them. There is no sky in NYC, no stars but sometimes the moon. Sammy zips up his coat and Jack does the same.

Jack shifts on his feet, looking toward Sammy and away. He doesn’t know if he wants to say it, and then he doesn’t know how. This isn’t how the story goes for people like him. Then he says it. “Do you – I mean, I have contacts in the industry, I can – if you give me your number, that is.”

“Oh,” says Sammy, while Ben grins.

“Or—” Jack backtracks “—or your email, that is.”

After a hesitation so long Jack begins to think he was too forward, that Sammy can see right through him, Sammy says, “My number’s fine.” Jack hands Sammy his phone, careful as he always is with guys not to brush his fingers.

He wants to ask Sammy more, wants to say, _Walk with me,_ doesn’t want to go yet, but Lily is at the corner with a face like a hurricane, jerking her hand in his direction and holding her phone to her ear.

“That’s my sister,” Jack says apologetically. “I have to… she… but I’ll see if we have any positions, or send you…” He’s already hurrying toward Lily, whose impatience grows by the second.

“Jack,” she snaps when he’s caught up and they’ve started across the street. Behind them, Jack can feel Sammy’s eyes on him. Sammy must have seen right through him, but Lily is at his side, so Jack doesn’t turn around.

By the time they reach the parking lot, Lily is muttering under her breath. Her phone is out of sight, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her oversized jacket. “Get in the car, Jack.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Pippa called me fifteen thousand times.”

“Is she okay?” Jack asks softly.

“In. The car. I don’t know. I’ll listen to all of them when we get home. I need a clear head to drive.”

“I’ll drive,” Jack offers. The buzz from getting a cute guy’s number, even if it’s strictly for work, fades before the ordinary dark of New York and Lily’s fear-strained voice.

They get home to about thirty voicemails, all but one also from her producer Pippa. This last voicemail they’ve been ignoring for two weeks, something from home. Lily goes through the first three while Jack washes up, but he pops his head out of the bathroom when she yells in frustration, just in time to see her slam her palm against the living room wall.

“Lily, you need to tell me what happened,” says Jack.

She shakes her hand and cradles it, but her eyes are still wild, and she tells him. She speaks slowly, but there is an unnerving lucidity in her tone. “I might have made a mess at work.”

Jack tries to measure the severity in her dark eyes, but all he can see is panic. “Like a messed-up-a-segment mess or a spilled-coffee-on-the-equipment mess?”

“Like a Pippa might press charges on account of the state I left the studio in.”

“Fuck, Lily,” says Jack. “Why?”

So she tells him.

It happened like this: Lily picked Jack up from work early in the car, early evening, thirty mph on sprawling New York crossroads heavy with yellow cabs, Lily cursing under her breath at every abrupt merge. And before that: Lily stormed out of her building without zipping her coat, her hands in aching fists and her arms aching up to her shoulders, body buzzing with an energy she couldn’t shake after three laps around the block, shirt plastered to her back. And before that: Lily with her limbs shaking, half a dozen shards of glass still hanging onto the window frame, her microphone mangled against the wall. And before that, Pippa, saying, _I’m this close to absolutely losing it with your bullshit._

So of course Jack steps into the bathroom and turns all the lights off. He clenches his fists until they ache and thinks back to Lily at the breakfast table, smearing jam over peanut butter over her bagel, her uncombed hair like a mop on her head. With his eyes closed, Jack watches Sammy go past him in reverse; Jack slides backwards in Lily’s horrible purple car, crawling through endless city traffic; he moonwalks home from work, unwaves goodbye to Lily in her car, puts breakfast into its cupboards.

He comes out of the bathroom that mid-morning blinking in the hall light, still in his pajamas, and knocks on Lily’s bedroom door.

“You awake?” he calls, and when she grumbles in response, he opens the door and crosses to pull the blinds.

“Get out, get out,” Lily slurs.

Jack’s laugh sounds forced, but Lily grins back. He says, “Not until you’re on your feet.”

Lily sticks her feet out from under the covers and shifts until they touch the floor. “On my feet. Get.”

“I’m in the mood for a sick day,” Jack announces in the kitchen, half an hour later, as Lily pushes her bagel into the toaster. “How about you?”

“Pippa would kill me,” says Lily.

“You’ve only used like two of your sick days,” Jack tells her.

“I never get sick.”

“Tell that to my sick days.”

Lily levels him with the stare that could raze the world. “What’s this about?”

“Um. I’m sick?” Jack supplies. The toaster pops up. Lily puts the bagel on her plate and gets started on the cream cheese and jam.

“You are not,” says Lily. “And it’s not like you to get cold feet at work.”

Jack fumbles. “No, I know. I know. But I’m… I’m getting these vibes from you? Which I’m not a huge fan of. So I was thinking Coney Island, or Westchester—”

“What the hell is there to do in Westchester?” Lily passes one half of the bagel to Jack, and he takes a bite.

“Um, go through Grand Central, obviously.”

“That’s stupid,” Lily decides. “You’re stupid.”

“Hey. Maybe I’m stupid, but I really, really don’t want to go in to work today, or see anybody, and judging by how mad you were last night, Lily, I feel like you feel the same. Maybe we can, I don’t know, like, reset our whole moods so we can go in tomorrow at one-hundred percent.”

“Since when are you big on the mental health day, kid?”

“Honestly? Since right about now.”

So they stay in, and by the time Jack thinks to check his phone, it is late evening. He types _Sammy,_ no last name, into his contacts, but between _Samira_ from college and _Simmons, Archie,_ there is only a blank space in his memory.

He sits on his bed and stares out the window, telling his reflection he is not wiping his eyes.

* * *

The men in Jack’s family can travel through time.

He has known since the day of his twenty-first birthday, mid-July three years ago. He’d stayed in New York every summer through college, working desk jobs for radio stations, and birthdays mostly consisted of home calling to sing scratchily through the telephone. He was homesick, but he didn’t breathe a word of it to Lily.

But Lily cleared out both their schedules for his birthday, for a celebration with a squished, freezer-burned Dairy Queen cake he’d pretended not to notice for a week and Jack’s first ever legal bottle of wine.

Still, Lily vanished into her room when Jack called home.

This is what his father told him, there in the kitchen with his cell phone pressed sweaty against his cheek: The men in their family can travel through time, but only to moments before the present lived moment, and they can only travel through their own lives.

It is hard to change the world with a power like that, his father told him, but maybe it could bring him a little bit of happiness.

* * *

Jack is still trying to figure out how to find Sammy’s last name to track him down when Sammy walks into the radio station. Jack has his studio door open with his headphones over just one ear, hold music running from his attempt to schedule one Howard Ford Beauregard, III, via Pete Myers, for an interview.

Usually the motion outside wouldn’t bother him, but someone stops and practically pokes their head into Jack’s room.

“I’m working,” Jack hisses, and stops.

Sammy’s hair is pulled up in a neat bun, and his tie brings out wide blue eyes that rake over Jack’s setup. He is sun-bright and dazzling, clearly trying to contain a grin.

“I didn’t, um. I’m sorry. Hi,” says Jack before he can stop himself.

“Hi,” says Sammy.

“New here?” asks Jack, pulling his headphones down around his neck.

Sammy glances nervously down the hall, as though seeking someone’s approval. “Just finished an interview, actually. Michael’s showing me around.”

“Really?” says Jack. “Any chance of him landing it, Mike?”

“Ask the boss man,” says Mike from out of sight.

Jack laughs—Merv has never so much as looked at him, not even in meetings, and Jack’s been here since college—and, laughing, he meets Sammy’s eyes. “I’m Jack, by the way. Jack, uh, Wright.”

He notes that Sammy does not say, _Maybe I’ll see you around,_ because it is the sort of thing Jack would like to be able to say himself. Or maybe it is a confidence thing. Jack remembers the tail-end of the conversation he caught in the escape room, the self-deprecation.

“Sammy Stevens. You’re a producer?”

“Best one here.” Jack laughs softly, watching a small smile push at the corners of Sammy’s lips.

Mike pops into the doorway. “Shame it’s not your opening, Jackie,” he says.

“Well,” says Jack, even though Mike just nicknamed him in front of Sammy, “if Merv wants to transfer him over here instead, I’m not gonna say no. You don’t give just everyone the tour.”

Mike says, “Don’t get your hopes up,” but he’s laughing, and that’s how Jack knows Sammy’s landed the job.

And Jack misses his opportunity. He’s left sitting with words like molasses on his tongue when Mike pulls the door shut: _When you’re finished here, maybe I could give Sammy a little interview of my own._

He stares at the closed door for a long time before he remembers that he’s in a call.

“Are you kidding me?” a voice is saying when he puts the headphones back over his ear. “You call up to bother my employer and spend the whole time having another whole conversation? I’m never listening to your station again.”

“Okay,” says Jack, a second before the line goes dead.

Because it was worth it, to introduce himself to Sammy, to be seen.

Sammy has to pass back this way to leave the building, and Jack props the door all the way open and keeps one eye on it.

When Sammy returns, he’s alone, a little more swing in his step and a little less nervous shake.

“Sammy?” says Jack. But Sammy walks right by him and that’s all right, that’s okay, he’s professional. This is professional. Jack’s not going to make it weird.

Then Sammy backtracks, and he’s smiling. “Jack.”

“Went well?” Jack says.

“I’m not going to—I hope so. It was valuable, either way.”

“You know,” says Jack, and almost backs out. Sammy rests a hand on the doorframe and looks at him. “It’s almost my lunch break, if you want to, uh, join me? Get a friend in the industry,” he continues.

Sammy stares at him.

“Not that I don’t think you know the industry, but I know what openings we’ve got and I figured—” He’s tongue-tied under that stare, or maybe it’s just that he’s gotten another chance with The One That Got Away.

Except that Sammy isn’t, and clichés don’t happen to you if you’re gay.

“It’s fine,” says Sammy. “I wouldn’t mind a friend.”

Jack suggests a sit-down chain a few blocks away, and Sammy goes along.

The first thing out of Jack’s mouth once they’re seated in the restaurant is, “Do you have a cat?”

“I—I mean, yes, but I’m definitely sure I lint-rolled all the cat hair off my nicest shirt.”

“No, no, no cat hair. Because of the cat light.”

Sammy says, cautiously, “What cat light?”

“At the—” Oh. Sammy doesn’t have that memory. Jack was never there with him. “On your keychain,” Jack finishes frantically.

Sammy shifts his weight and pulls the spare keyring out of his pocket. He has a couple of keys, including a car key despite the impossibility of driving cars in the city, and a red cat laser.

“Okay,” Sammy says slowly.

This is no way to make a first impression, to cite a memory he has taken from Sammy. After three years, Jack should know how to keep his timelines straight, except he feels them all intensely and all at once.

“Will you excuse me?” says Jack. Sammy nods, so Jack finds himself in the single-stall men’s room, waiting for its automatic light to go out before he realizes it’s a switch.

He comes out at the beginning of the conversation, having just left Sammy to sit down and scratch at his neck beneath his tie. Sammy looks older than him, but Jack can’t figure out how much. A few years, at most. He’s clean-shaven and there’s no grey in his blonde hair, but bags hang deep beneath his eyes. The blue of his dress shirt brightens his eyes.

Jack picks up the menu and stares at it for a moment, even though he knows exactly what he’s going to order.

Sammy says, “Have you been producing long?”

“Honestly? Forever. I dabbled in high school and did it all through college. Practically ran the campus’s station. My sister was the real star, though. She is a phenomenal journalist and a phenomenal, take-no-bullshit broadcaster.”

Sammy sighs. “Sounds nice.”

“I’ve been in this job for a couple of years now. Started at a desk job like everybody else, because college work is college work and they still want you to intern or answer phones for a while so you don’t get a big head, but…”

“You must know everyone,” says Sammy with a sideways grin.

“Well, it’s not the biggest station, but I know how to get my name out there. What about you?”

“I just moved here from Florida. A job fell through and I thought, hell, it’s as good a time as any to get out.”

Jack studies him, chewing on his tongue. “So you probably get the _Ever been to Disneyworld?_ a lot, huh?” Jack does a vocal impression as he says it.

Sammy laughs, but as he talks, his voice darkens. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t realize there’s more to Florida than Orlando.”

“Not that much more, I take it.”

“It’s the American South,” Sammy says. “It’s pretty much Disneyworld, alligators, and Republicans.”

“I’m from California, and that’s pretty much just L.A. and San Francisco.”

“Where in California?”

Jack grins, and watches Sammy grin back, put a little bit at ease. “L.A.”

“Typical,” says Sammy. “I don’t know what I expected.”

“Hey. The seedy side of Los Angeles is not to be trifled with. Crack capital of the world.”

Sammy puts his hands up. “No trifling. That can’t be real.”

“It is.”

So it should be easy, he thinks, and it’s not. It is impossible to know if he is crossing a line with every word, to know where the line lies between professional and what he wants to say.

They are halfway through the meal, still careful to swallow their food before speaking, when Sammy says, “Ben says New York is wonderful, but everyone else says it’ll eat me alive.”

Jack chews deliberately. “It’s in how you approach it, I think. How much space you’re willing to give. The rule is basically: don’t give space but don’t be a dick.”

“Do no harm but take no shit,” intones Sammy.

“Yeah, pretty much. A lot of people haven’t figured out the _don’t be a dick_ part, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem for you.” A beat. “Think of it like this. All the extremes of human nature are just sort of mashed together here. It’s a caricature of a city, really. The most important thing is to be kind, and don’t give yourself up to it.”

When their plates are empty, the buffer of food gone from the conversation, Jack begins to think about dropping hints.

Jack relives five minutes, over and over, where he tells Sammy, honest as he can be, “I’m gay.”

He tells Sammy his sister says there’s no better Pride than New York’s.

He tells Sammy he pursued gender and sexuality studies alongside journalism at NYU for two years, before he abruptly switched the former to cinema studies. Lily yelled about it in their shared off-campus flat, her then-girlfriend just out the door. But he was trying to figure himself out.

He turns the bathroom light off and goes back. He doesn’t drop a single hint.

How many smiles has he lost from all this time-jumping? How can he keep track of the real ones, the right ones, the ones he’s going forward with?

But he’s going forward with the soft look in Sammy’s eyes when Jack picks up the bill, claiming that if Sammy’s out of work, it’s the least Jack can do.

“You go get some sleep,” says Jack. “I’ll make sure you get a call whatever the outcome. But I think you’ll get the job. Honestly? I think you’ve already got it.”

“How?” says Sammy.

“My coworkers have some tells, and I’ve had to learn how to read the room. I’m not saying it to be nice. I knew right from the start.”

Sammy mouths _oh_ and looks down.

“Come on,” says Jack. “I have to get back to work.”

They rise as one, and then they stand awkwardly, staring at the table. The first to move breaks the tryst.

Slowly, softly, Jack says, “When I said I’d be your friend in the industry, well, I can’t very well do that without your number. Or your address, if you’ve figured out how to convert the vermin of the streets into carrier pigeons.”

“Oh,” says Sammy. They still haven’t moved, but Sammy takes his phone out. When they exchange phones, Jack nearly forgets his own number.

They part at the crosswalk, no handshake, no hug, the wind howling between skyscrapers and through the crevasses of their bodies.

“See you around, Stevens,” says Jack.

Sammy raises his hand in a static wave. “See you, Jack Wright.”

And it sounds like a gift on his tongue, like it was made to live there.

Jack watches Sammy disappear into the midday crowd. He decides he’s going to memorize the number, the name, and stares at it the whole way back to the station.

* * *

When he gets home, Lily is holed up in her bedroom. He puts the kettle on, pops toast into the toaster, and listens to the low and animated rumble of Lily’s voice into her microphone. If she’s podcasting this late, it must mean something’s wrong at work. Sometimes, Jack thinks that half of her podcasting is an audio diary for his sister. Tear a hole out of the world and put it into the hole torn out of you.

The toast pops up, and he lathers it with Nutella. He catches the kettle right before it screams, its voice dying in its throat as he pours. He has perfected the art of silence, of creeping on tiptoes past Lily’s door, of being the quiet younger sibling. Of being seen and not heard. Of falling short in every way that matters.

So when he turns on a microphone, he screams his voice raw. He cranks up the volume in his headphones and lets other people scream loud enough to fill his ears, his mouth shut. And Lily, with fire in her heart, screams louder than anyone he’s ever known, except Lily doesn’t stop screaming when the mic is off.

Opening the windows, he sits on the sofa, sets his plate and mug on the coffee table, and unties his shoes. He’s halfway through his toast when Lily comes out. She’s still wearing the day’s makeup, bold eyeshadow and lips faded in the center from licking her lips. She is barefoot and in shorts, and her button-up, one of his, is tied over her tank top and falls off one shoulder.

And once Jack sees her, he is immediately at ease.

“Bad day?” he asks.

“You could say that,” says Lily, tough as always.

“Tea?”

Lily falls onto the sofa beside him. “Yeah, I could do with some of that.”

Jack picks up his mug, untouched and still warm, and passes it to her. The breeze stirs the thread, pushes Lily’s pixie cut into her face. He says, “It’s lemon, if that’s okay.”

She pulls a face, says, “Lemon, yuck,” and then she takes a long sip. Her eyes fall closed.

Jack examines her for a few moments before he goes into the kitchen to pour himself another mug. Bobbing the teabag in the water, he says, “Did something happen at work?”

“Sure,” says Lily, her voice bitter, the way it gets when she’s dealing with an unsavory emotion – and to Lily, most emotions are unsavory. “Pippa is about this close to firing me and I lost my temper twice, which bodes wonderfully for my prospects.”

“Lily,” says Jack, sitting beside her. He sets down his mug and folds himself against her. Instinctively, her arm falls around his shoulder. “Do you still have the job?”

It is silent, the city breeze cool and pungent, filled with dogs barking, birds fluttering, people crying all the way across town. Jack reaches up and takes Lily’s hand, and he looks up, too, but he can only see her chin.

“I guess not,” she says at last. He can tell it takes all her effort to admit it.

“I have. Well. I have an opening, actually, and I’ve been looking for someone to fill it.”

Lily laughs. “I’m not gonna be produced by my kid brother, even if he’ll tolerate my temper.”

It hurts, but Jack tries to keep that out of his town. “Why not? You didn’t mind it in college.”

She looks up at the ceiling, her fingers drumming on Jack’s shoulder. “There’s how many people in this godforsaken city, and of all of them, I’m gonna end right back where I started. We’re making our own ways, Jack, and college… yeah. College was a thing that happened to us. But I don’t want to get a position ‘cause you pity me.”

Jack pulls away to drink his tea, to hide the hurt hot in his throat, and Lily’s hand trails across his shoulder and lingers.

He says, “Send in your résumé anyway. I won’t even be involved in the process if you’re worried I won’t be fair.”

“I’m not worried.”

Jack laughs. “Of course. The indomitable Lily Wright.”

“Phenomenal journalist,” she adds, ruffling his hair.

“The best.”

* * *

Sammy gets the job, of course. He starts days later, arrives dressed sharper than anyone in the building about half an hour after Jack, knocks on Jack’s door just to say _Hi,_ which throws Jack off for the next hour.

The more time Sammy spends at the station, in the kitchenette filling up his coffee when Jack comes in, in his variety of vintage band t-shirts, the harder it is to look at him. He brings all the light in with him. He smiles big, as if each day he comes into work is a gift.

Jack texts him covertly during his shift and steals glances at his phone. He learns Sammy’s coffee order and brings him a new mug when he makes his own. He fantasizes about producing for Sammy, about Sammy sitting on the other side of the board and not talking to him but for him nonetheless.

Jack doesn’t call anything he does with Sammy a date, not to Sammy and certainly not to himself, but they get lunch together most days and some days, when he has the car, he drives Sammy home so he won’t have to brave the subway. He hums so much at home Lily asks if he’s in love at least twice a day.

And he denies it, of course, but it doesn’t shut Lily up for a second.

Their work schedules don’t always line up, but when they do, Jack walks Sammy to the subway. Sammy accompanies Jack to the post office. He gets to know all Jack’s favorite pizza places, sitting at the counters with greasy fingers, laughing.

He talks a lot about his friend Ben, friend, veritable tour guide, and the world’s worst matchmaker. Then he falls silent and looks at Jack with wary eyes, like he’s daring Jack to ask _Why?_

Jack asks, “Why?”

Sammy hesitates a few moments before saying, leadenly, “Because Ben doesn’t understand that I’m not interested in the exact type of girl he’s interested in.”

So Jack asks Sammy his type, hoping it will put his mind at ease, and Sammy looks away. He won’t look at Jack for longer than three seconds for the rest of the day.

Jack goes back, and this time, he keeps his mouth shut.

It takes months for Jack to invite Sammy home, and even then, it’s not a proper invite. He has Lily’s car for the day, but he left his wallet on the dresser and is driving without a license. He pulls up on the curb, and Sammy says, “This is it?”

Jack nods. His place with Lily is on the third story above a laundromat in one of the shortest buildings on the block. The four upstairs apartments all enter through a narrow red door.

At the door, Jack is suddenly shy, his mouth dry. He licks his lips and is certain he’s imagined the way Sammy’s eyes dart, after a second, up to his eyes. Jack’s hands are heavy and empty at his sides.

He looks up, but all the lights are off. Lily is either out or asleep, or watching Buzzfeed Unsolved in the dark. And if she is watching YouTube, she could come to the window and see Jack standing two feet from the man he won’t say he likes. She could greet them at the door, saying, “So I finally meet the fabled crush.”

“Which one is yours?” Sammy says uncertainly, the worry line between his brows distinct. He is close enough for Jack to reach out and take his hands, close enough for a rom-com kiss on the doorstep.

Instead, Jack points out his living room window. “I’m gonna – I’m just gonna run inside. It’ll take a second.”

Then he says, “Unless you want to come in and see the pigsty I live in.” He is bold because he knows he can go back, because the world is full of options for him.

When they reach Jack’s apartment, the key doesn’t turn, which means Lily has left the door unlocked.

And there she is, at the dining room table, slurping from a bowl of soup. She sits with her back to them, turning when the door opens. The grin that spreads across her face makes Jack’s stomach drop.

“Look at that,” says Lily immediately. “Jack Wright brought a guy home.”

“Listen, you. I couldn’t let him sit outside in your awful purple car while passersby laughed at him.”

Lily laughs. “Whatever you say. I can’t believe you drove the guy here.”

“He’s a coworker, Lily,” Jack protests, because Sammy’s cheeks are red and he’s not meeting either of their eyes.

“Okay,” says Lily, shrugging, “but you know how it goes.”

“Do not.”

“Sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S—”

He goes back. He and Sammy are standing on the sidewalk looking up, trying to gauge Lily’s level of wakefulness.

“Do you mind waiting?” he asks nervously. “Just for a second, I’ll be in and out. Place is a mess and—”

“Yeah, sure,” says Sammy, voice so sweet. Jack can see both Sammy and the windows of his apartment without turning his head, and maybe they are too close to not be afraid. “But I have to wonder when I’m going to meet this sister of yours?”

He’s still a little shaken when he says, “When I can convince her to play nice.”

Sammy raises his eyebrows. “Oh, she’s that type.”

“Okay, for starters, no trash-talking my sister, but then, secondly, the two of you would be a force of sass I am not prepared to deal with.”

Sammy’s eyes drop, and Jack hopes that doesn’t mean he’s crestfallen, or hurt, because that would mean he was hoping for an invite in. And that means a lot of things Jack doesn’t want to think about.

But a week later, over the subway roar, as Sammy’s stop approaches (Jack’s place is another four stops), Sammy says, “Want to come over for dinner?”

Be professional, Jack thinks, and repositions his bag on his shoulder.

“I’m actually a pretty good cook,” Sammy adds, and Jack notices that he’s shifted closer to be heard. He thinks to be heard. Sammy smiles, and Jack realizes he’s smiling back. The Saturday night crowd almost separates them, but Jack finds Sammy at the subway entrance, haloed by light from every direction in the city that never sleeps.

It’s a few blocks to Sammy’s, and Jack spends the walk aware of his hands, one gripping his bag and the other in his pocket. They stop in a small grocery store for Sammy to buy onions and a box of cookies, while the sky outside gets darker and the streets grow brighter.

Sammy’s building is the darkest on the block. Sammy, walking perhaps a pace ahead of Jack, slows as they approach. He turns, opens his mouth and says nothing. “This is it. You get to see my bachelor pad. Try not to—try not to judge too hard.”

“It’ll be fine,” says Jack, and the hand in his pocket twitches, preparing for the snaps back in time he will inevitably pursue over the course of the night. “I have to live with my sister. Nothing can possibly be worse than the mess she leaves.” It’s not fair to Lily, but the longer he talks, the more he postpones the moment of entering the building, of being _there._ Of crossing a threshold he’s been dreaming of but not daring to imagine.

Sammy hesitates, pulling his keys out of his pocket. “Okay,” he says, voice tense or nervous.

They pass the cramped front hall and take the elevator, little more than a metal box, and Jack’s mouth is too dry to say anything. While they walk, Sammy lists everything in his pantry for Jack, searching for something to make that Jack will like.

At the apartment, on the eighth floor, Sammy ushers Jack in first and closes the door behind him. Sammy slips his shoes off on the shoe mat, and when he ducks his head, his hair brushes Jack’s chest. The small front hall, illuminated by a single yellow bulb, opens up into a dark living room, but the warmth is here, between their bodies.

Jack swallows. He says, “Sammy?”

“Yeah?”

“I might. Um. I might be reading the room all wrong, and if I am, I’m terribly, terribly sorry.”

“Jack,” says Sammy. He turns to look at Jack, his eyes so blue, and Jack almost loses his nerve. Nothing moves in his periphery, not even strands of Sammy’s hair. He can’t look anywhere but Sammy’s eyes.

“This isn’t how it goes, this isn’t a movie, and I’m so, so sorry, but…”

He almost stops talking at the expression on Sammy’s face, the sudden shut-down of fear. He says it quickly, before he can stop. “Can I kiss you?”

Sammy’s voice is a breath. “Oh.”

Jack gives Sammy a moment of silence, watches his face closely. Sammy’s hands are shaking. If Jack were looking down, he would be able to see the goosebumps on Sammy’s arms.

“I’m sorry, fuck, I—you’re my coworker, you’re my friend, you’re probably not even gay—”

“No,” says Sammy, still so soft, and Jack’s blood goes cold. “I mean, yes. I mean, I’d like that.”

“Oh,” says Jack. “Okay. Then in that case.” His heart louder than Sammy’s voice in his ears, he bridges the few inches between his mouth and Sammy’s. He keeps his eyes open until their lips touch, so that he won’t misaim, and then all he can see is the shape of Sammy’s lips behind his eyelids. Sammy’s breath is warm on his cheek, his lips chapped and slow and stretched in a smile.

Jack reaches up and places his hand on Sammy’s jaw. He can feel the rough edges of day-old stubble, but Sammy’s cheekbone is soft and smooth under his thumb. He can feel Sammy’s frantic heart, and the pulse of his own in his temples.

Jack pulls back first, slowly, and for seconds he doesn’t open his eyes. He lets his hand linger on Sammy’s jaw for a moment longer. Sammy blinks his eyes open, and Jack watches as the relaxed expression takes on the pinch of worry, his mouth parted. Jack keeps staring at that mouth, and now he doesn’t pretend he isn’t.

Sammy’s eyes are filled with stars, and he looks at Jack with a gentle awe. Jack has never felt so precious.

“I’m glad you beat me to that,” Sammy whispers.

Jack laughs breathily. “Wow. Um. So I take it you’re not going to throw me out of your apartment for that.”

“And you’re not going to tell me I kiss like shit and tell people at work I came on to you.”

Okay, thinks Jack. That’s what we’re dealing with. He can work with that. He’s not unfamiliar with fears like that.

“Of course not,” says Jack. “I get it. Sammy? I kind of want to kiss you again.”

“I don’t know where to put my hands,” Sammy apologizes.

“You’re wonderful,” Jack says, as though that answers anything, watching Sammy’s mouth. He reaches up and touches Sammy’s jaw again, his hairline. He can feel himself beaming.

Jack helps Sammy prepare dinner and asks to kiss him a few more times. He takes all his cues from Sammy. Neither of them know the steps to this dance, but the second time they kiss, Sammy cups the back of Jack’s head, and all Jack’s breath escapes him at once.

He doesn’t go back. He doesn’t want to risk losing that moment.


	2. Chapter 2

Jack spends a lot of his days at Sammy’s, mostly to spend time with Sammy but partly to avoid Lily’s everyday fury, the spittle flying from her mouth, her two glasses of wine at dinner and two while watching the evening news. When he is home, he keeps his head down; cracks familiar jokes to diffuse Lily’s spark, pin pulled; regales her with stories from the commute or some conspiracy nut on the subway wearing a vest of cardboard that read, WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.

Sammy’s cat takes to Jack slowly, curls up in Sammy’s lap and watches Jack with yellow eyes. It sniffs Jack’s fingers but doesn’t deign to let him touch its scruff. It’s a ginger tabby, a scruffy old thing with a scarred left eye and more fur than body—and it has plenty of body, because Sammy feeds it generously. Sammy tells him it was a stray that used to hang around his old station in Tampa.

Sammy lends Jack one of his sweatshirts to wear to entice the old cat, and Jack decides to never take it off.

“What’s its name?” Jack asks.

“Haven’t named it. I was hoping someone would adopt it before I moved. On the vets’ records it’s Samuel Stevens, Jr.”

“Oh, well, that won’t do,” Jack laughs. “Especially not the _Samuel_ part.”

“I’m glad you agree. Especially because it’s a girl.”

Jack holds the cat up, and says, in his best cat voice, “Do you look like a Samuel Stevens, miss? Are you a tiny baby Sammy Stevens? Are you, sweetheart?”

“Don’t inflate her ego,” says Sammy, and Jack extracts a single finger from the cat’s fur to show Sammy.

At work, Jack and Sammy are strictly coworkers, which it is easier to be without the maw of desire, the confusion, the distraction of his lips. Now Jack frets at being seen leaving work with Sammy, at catching the subway together and getting off at the same stop. He sees hate in the eyes of the people kindest to him, and sometimes Sammy can’t kiss all the fear out of him. And there is fear enough in Sammy’s mouth, too.

They don’t need to talk about it, but they do. Sammy’s worry has him on edge for days, for weeks, keeps his shoulders stiff while Jack holds space for Sammy to open up.

“I’m—I understand if you want to,” Sammy tells him one morning over breakfast. “But I don’t want anyone to know. Not—not yet.”

The pause goes for so long that Jack shivers. He says, slowly, “We don’t have to be out just because we’re together. I’m happy, I’m more than happy, to keep it like this.”

Sammy exhales and closes his eyes.

“Actually,” says Jack. “I was kind of worried that you’d want to let the world know and I wouldn’t be able to say no to you. But since you’ve alleviated all my worries, I motion to move to a make-out session and then I’ll heat up leftovers.”

But even at home, Sammy is sometimes shy, hesitant with affection. He apologizes often, for things he has done and things he had failed to do. He checks himself, overthinks kisses and hands on knees.

“You’re not ever coming out, are you?” Jack says after a couple of months, carefully. They’ve finished breakfast, and Sammy is still looking through the newspaper. Jack doesn’t want to demand, to insist Sammy put himself in a situation he’s not ready to be in, but he kept coming back to the question.

“I’m,” says Sammy. “I’m not sure.”

“It’s okay.”

“I can’t envision myself ever telling anyone. That we’re here, that we have what we have right now, is a miracle I can’t begin to describe.”

“My sister says New York is the best possible place to be out in,” says Jack. “But then again, she had a habit of telling guys who asked her out in high school that they didn’t have enough estrogen. Since then, she’s figured out about transgender people, but she kind of filled the quota on gay Wright siblings.”

The newspaper paper trembling in his hands, Sammy says, “It’s better than where I’m from, that’s for sure. But it’s that thing, isn’t it? _Wherever you go, you take yourself with you._ It’s not—it’s not _being_ gay, it’s… it’s me, it’s… I don’t know, Jack.”

And there it is, the cavern of the thing Sammy Stevens is talking around every time he opens his mouth, the past he has run from and that hangs around his neck and chokes his voice.

“Hey,” says Jack. He takes Sammy’s shaking hands, his eyes darting all around Sammy’s face. “Hey. Look at me.”

Sammy goes still, and it takes a few seconds for his eyes to find Jack’s.

Jack strokes Sammy’s palms. “I’m never gonna make you tell anyone to prove yourself to me. I’m not sitting here thinking, Gee, Sammy Stevens, I wish he would just make a public proposal already so all of New York knows everything about our personal lives. I’m just as scared as you are.”

“You are?” whispers Sammy.

“Yeah,” says Jack, although he’s not sure anyone in the world is as full of fear as Sammy. “It’s just you and me, for as long as you want.”

They are halfway out the door, Sammy’s key in the lock, when Jack says, “I forgot something inside.” He has been hearing his voice say _public proposal,_ or just _proposal,_ over and over while brushing his teeth, while doing the dishes side-by-side with Sammy; he has been thinking how to say _I didn’t mean proposal, if I came on too strong, I’m sorry,_ without Sammy thinking he means an end. Without making himself temporary.

He goes back.

_Cream cheese on Sammy’s knuckles, Sammy’s eyes an ocean of fear, the early morning light bouncing off neighbors’ windows and into Jack’s eyes, Sammy taking Jack’s reading glasses off in the bathroom, toothbrush hanging out of Jack’s mouth while he talks._

Jack takes it out. He says, instead, “I’m never gonna make you tell anyone anything.” He says the part about fear, too, and then he says, “You’re perfect to me.”

* * *

The time Jack spends the night, Sammy lends him a pair of pajamas. It’s spontaneous, Jack closing his book, his work things in his messenger bag beside the door.

“Guess I’d better head off soon,” Jack is saying, not rising yet.

“I, um,” says Sammy on the far side of the sofa, his legs on Jack’s lap. He is absently shining the cat laser on the rug while the old cat writhes around it, keychain clinking. He cuts himself off and starts again. “I don’t mind if you stay.”

Jack is silent, staring at Sammy. “The night?” he asks softly.

“Well, yeah, unless you have plans with your sister. I only have a single. Bed. It’s not—” He looks helpless, tongue between his teeth, hair hanging about his eyes. “But I don’t really… have… spare blankets. I mean I have _a_ spare, but it’s the kind you put on top of the comforter. And I _flail_.”

Jack says nothing, lets Sammy speak, but Sammy falls silent. Sammy turns his head and stares into the kitchen, his brow drawn. Nothing comes easily to Sammy, Jack is learning; everything gets filtered through three levels of worry, gets caught in his throat, overanalyzed and held up against a perfect standard he doesn’t think he’s ever filled.

If only Sammy could go back in time like Jack, could always know what’s coming, could ease his panic. Every time Jack does it, it feels like making Sammy go though the same thing twice.

So Jack has to say something. “Oh. _Oh._ Sammy.”

“If you want to. I mean. You don’t have to.”

And Jack beams, bag forgotten beside the door. He bends over Sammy’s legs to hide his smile, which might just be the biggest smile since his NYU acceptance. “Of course I want to. _Sammy_. You have no idea.”

He feels a hand on his chin and looks up. “I think I have an idea,” Sammy deadpans, but his face is split in a grin. He looks like the sun, eyes as blue as a backyard pool, scrunched up just for Jack.

It is a rhythm they don’t know, yet, preparing for bed, changing in the bathroom or the bedroom. Sammy digs out a spare toothbrush for Jack, and then he disappears into his bedroom for several minutes, presumably to tidy up the mess he’s left.

The thrill evens out just enough to call Lily, to tell her to go ahead with dinner because he won’t be home until tomorrow

She laughs at him, says, “Busy man.”

“Don’t go there,” Jack says. “I love you. Save some ice cream for me.”

“Since you said that, I’ll be sure to finish it off.”

Later, running his toothbrush under the faucet in the tiny bathroom, their bodies pressed against each other, Sammy asks, “I didn’t ruin it for you, did I?”

Jack finishes gargling mouthwash, then says, “Shh, God, no. But I wanted you to be the one to ask.”

Their mouths still white with toothpaste, Jack kisses Sammy breathless.

And Sammy does flail in bed, of course, hours later, when they finally turn off the bedside light. Neither of them are completely in their pajamas, and Jack has discovered that the light through the red lampshade falling on Sammy’s face makes Sammy look young and soft and radiant with his mouth parted as if Jack is the most wonderful thing he’s ever seen, that his shoulders are soft, that he has acne on his back and not enough muscle to cover his ribs. Jack runs his hand up and down the bumps of Sammy’s spine. He can barely keep his eyes open but keeps kissing Sammy anyway, slow and soft, lingering for just a second before his lips close.

Sammy flails, and it wakes Jack, but they are pressed close enough together that Jack can take Sammy’s hands around his waist and hold them close.

And, God, he wants to hold Sammy close like this as long as he can.

* * *

Lily is telling him over the telephone, “Don’t think you can just vanish completely from my life without even telling me where you’re going.”

It’s maybe the kindest she’s been to him on the phone in a week. He sits on Sammy’s discolored couch with his bare feet on the cushions, an old, dog-eared copy of _The Da Vinci Code_ spine-up beside him and the cat stretched out on the armrest. In the kitchen, Sammy is seasoning vegetables and marinating chicken. Jack would help him, but Lily called just as he was washing his hands.

He says, “I’m not trying to.”

“Well, you’re not trying very hard, are you?”

“I love you,” he tells her. “But I’m grown up too, and I have my own life.”

“I have to call you if I want to talk, and mostly you don’t even answer. We’re all we’ve got, Jack.”

“Lily,” he tries again, because she’s right, or she would be right if New York hadn’t changed things, hadn’t opened up the world for them.

“Don’t tell me. There’s a guy in your life.” After a very long pause, because Jack has a horrible lying voice and Lily knows all his tells, she says, “So there’s a guy, and you forget all about your sister who you followed all the way across the country to go to college with.”

Jack says, “Okay. There’s a guy.” But he still glances around the apartment and out the windows before he says it.

“God, you were so torn up about going to NYU, even though there were places you could get a sports scholarship to, and getting some picture-perfect two-room flat in Manhattan with me. And I get—I get spreading your wings, striking it out on your own. Hell, who wants to live with their boring old sister? But you could have told me.”

It is a testament to her situation that she does not immediately, with a glee reserved for Jack’s crushes alone, ask Sammy’s name, zodiac sign, hair color, blood type, and everything else about him.

“Is that your sister?” Sammy calls, appearing for a moment in the kitchen doorway with a dishrag in his hands.

Jack covers the phone mic and says, “Yeah, and you don’t want to meet her in the mood she’s in.”

Sammy shrugs and returns to his cooking, the light behind him warm and catching on loose strands of hair. Jack watches him go before speaking.

“Lily,” Jack says, picking up the book. He puts the old receipt between the pages and sets it on the coffee table. “I love you. But I can’t always tell you things.”

Her voice is quiet, hurt but hard anyway. “Why not? It’s still Lily and Jack against the world. It’s always gonna be us.”

He hates having this conversation in Sammy’s apartment, with Sammy in the other room listening to his pleading voice talk about the ugliest parts of his life. “Because you’d be mad, and I don’t want to live anywhere that feels like high school, so I’m putting my foot down. I need you to stop living like you’re in high school.”

“What, the dishes, the laundry, the mess? Or is it the people I bring home?”

“No. You can invite anyone you want home as long as you’re quiet.” He lowers his voice to a whisper, his eyes on the doorway. “I’m talking about the way you live like you want to knock the world down.” Because Jack is standing in the space between Lily and the world. Lily’s hard edges fit perfectly into the gritty subway grid, and Jack isn’t always sure he’s strong enough to keep standing.

Lily barks out a laugh. “That’s how you have to live in New York. Give an inch of space and it crushes you. And I, for one, will never be crushed.”

“That’s not how I live,” says Jack.

“Yeah, I know. You live like you’re afraid to stir the leaves.”

“It’s stir the water,” Jack corrects, “and I don’t.”

“I know what I said. When you stop looking like a deer with headlight eyes, I’ll use clichés that are more palatable for you.”

“And I think it’s crushing you anyway.” Cold in just a t-shirt, he twists around on the couch to pull the window closed.

Lily scoffs. “I’m your big sister and I deserve to know what’s going on, so that at the very least I’m not kept up imagining you dead in a sewer somewhere.”

“That’s gross,” laughs Jack.

“Dead under a tree in Central Park. That sound better to you?”

“I’d rather be dead under a tree than in the sewers.”

“I’d rather you not be dead anywhere,” says Lily.

Unsure how to respond, Jack lets the silence grow. He pulls his feet up. Miraculously, the conversation has grown more comfortable, more Jack And Lily Against The World and less Lily Against Jack And The World. But neither of them are sure how to fit back into the bottom floor of their house in Los Angeles, its big windows, their rooms across the hall, their parents stomping or shouting about dinner or having sex upstairs.

“Put him on the phone,” says Lily finally, just as Jack is figuring out how to say goodbye. He makes a startled sound. “The guy. Your boyfriend. I want to meet him.”

“Oh. Uh. He’s not in right now.” He knows Sammy is listening, whether he intends to or not, and he knows he has to be careful about what he says.

“I literally heard you talking to him two minutes ago.”

“Okay.” Jack fumbles. “He’s in the bathroom.” He hears the clink of a glass against Lily’s teeth, which means they’re on a timer. He gets up and paces the living room, paces to the kitchen doorway. When Sammy sees him, Jack puts a finger to his lips and rolls his eyes. Sammy laughs.

Lily’s silence makes the lie unbearable. Jack says, “Okay. Yeah, okay. I’ll see what I can do. But not – not over the phone. You’re more than frightening enough in person.”

“Yeah, yeah,” drawls Lily. “And you better call more often.”

So after he’s hung up, the phone still in his hand, Jack says, “Do you want to come over and meet my sister?”

* * *

Even at home, Sammy is cautious. He glances out windows more than anyone Jack’s ever seen, with the exception of young women in period dramas. Sammy “Elizabeth Bennett” Stevens, he thinks, and laughs so hard he chokes and Sammy has to pound on his back.

They only kiss inside the apartment, but when the door shuts, their hands are linked.

And Jack starts to think of Sammy’s place as home, too, as the months pass. It never gets any bigger, especially after Jack brings a gym bag filled with clothes, the books Lily won’t miss, his shaving cream and nicest colognes, but they rearrange the living room furniture so there’s more space for two bodies. The cat starts sitting on Jack’s lap when Sammy is in the bathroom. Jack starts pouring the dry food, but he can’t convince Sammy to name the cat Samira.

Sammy doesn’t have a television, and most of the moving boxes are still sitting, unopened, piled in the corners of the room.

One evening, Jack says, “Let’s get this place unpacked. Hard to call a place a home if most of it’s hidden away.”

It takes three days, mostly at night when they’ve come back from work. First the mess expands, sticks of homeless objects piling up on the dining room table, in the corners of rooms, in the hall closet or right outside. The cat jumps inside half-empty boxes, and sometimes they have to reach in and pull her out. They crush all the boxes and Sammy carries them downstairs while Jack examines the open space of Sammy’s living room, the bright corners where the light now reaches, and smooths out the rug while the cat examines the lack of cardboard with displeased eyes.

Jack puts his books on the bookcase beside Sammy’s and gets measurements for a television set. “You have to keep on top of the news,” Jack tells him, and Sammy says, “I don’t,” which settles the matter.

Jack sleeps in Sammy’s bed every time he stays over, and he stays over most nights. He wakes to Sammy’s hair gold in the New York pre-dawn, his eyes fond and clouded with sleep, his chin soft with stubble.

Jack starts showing up to work with cat fur covering his khakis, so he takes five minutes in the morning to rub the lint roller down his body. Sammy gets his back, the seat of his jacket.

Jack wants to start every morning like this for the rest of his life, wants to get pate on his fingers feeding Sammy’s cat and watch Sammy take a bite out of his toast before buttering it, but he has both Sammy and Lily to think about.

* * *

The first thing Jack notices about the apartment he shares with Lily is that it smells like six weeks’ worth of dirty laundry. She has all the windows open, of course, and if there is dirty laundry, she’s hidden it. She has cords all over the living room floor. In his absence, she migrated her recording equipment out of her bedroom, so that he can barely see the living room through it. Most of the houseplants have died.

The setup explains Lily’s cold feet, the constant calls where she’d insist they meet anywhere else: Sammy’s, outside work, a fancy restaurant where she’d pay. But Jack insisted, every time, that they could cook a meal together, that they could be brother and sister and bring Sammy into their world like that.

Jack enters first and mouths an apology to Sammy in the doorway. A chair scrapes, and Jack turns to see Lily rise from the dinner table, feet bare.

She stands before them, an inch shorter than Jack and full of fire. Her dark eyes are sharp, her mouth lopsided, her body blocking them from the apartment. She looks Sammy up and down, unrepentant.

“So you’re the one,” says Lily, voice harsh, and Jack watches her carefully to gauge the trajectory of this conversation.

“Um.” Sammy turns to Jack with wide eyes. “Yeah, I—yeah, probably.”

“Like, _the_ one, who has completely stolen my brother’s heart?”

Sammy looks at Jack, his face reddening. Jack loops his arm through Sammy’s, and Lily’s eyes follow the motion. Lily is the only person who has seen them like this, Jack’s hand sliding down Sammy’s arm to touch his fingers.

“Yes, he’s stolen my heart, wholly and completely. Just vet him and get it over with,” says Jack.

Lily raises an eyebrow. Her hair has grown out, her undercut shaggy and the rest of her hair hanging uncombed over her eyes. Her shirt reads, _I know I’m f*cking gorgeous._ “I know I’m that good, but anyone you’ve chosen deserves a little more consideration than that.” She pushes her hair back sloppily and turns to Sammy. “Lily Wright. I’m the one who’s been looking out for the kid. At least, I used to be.”

Of course she’d say that, Jack thinks, and feels his ears heat. “Lily.”

“What? Must be a hell of a guy.” She wags her eyebrows as she says it.

Jack frowns. He is waiting for the tripwire, for the moment when Lily’s flattery falls away to reveal her agenda. “Is the plan for me to cook while you bulldoze over my boyfriend?”

Lily flips him off, grinning. “Something like that.”

“Great.”

“Actually, I started thawing some chicken hours ago, and I’ve set myself strictly on snowplow mode, not bulldoze, so don’t worry your pretty little head.”

“Consider it not worried,” Jack grumbles.

If Jack had let Sammy come inside that first time, months ago, they could have avoided this hostility. Maybe Lily would have simmered over, maybe he could have learnt to swallow the embarrassment, but Sammy keeps looking at Jack with wide eyes.

“Will you excuse me?” says Jack, already in the hall. Sammy holds onto his hand as long as he can.

Behind him, he hears Lily say, “Jack gives his whole heart to anything he loves, and I guess that’s you, now.”

He shouldn’t go back; he shouldn’t. He closes the bathroom door.

_The subway roar, Jack spraying cologne and Sammy reaching his hand out for the bottle, the subway crowded with the after-work rush, bodies shuddering against them._

He steps out of Sammy’s closet.

“I’m going to make a reservation,” he tells Sammy as he enters the living room. “Lily’s… she needs about a year or three to psych herself up for dinner guests, and I haven’t been there all that much to help her, so…”

“We could invite her over,” Sammy offers.

“We… what? Really?”

“Well, I mean, she’s your sister and you love her, so it’s fine by me.”

Jack looks around this place and isn’t sure he wants to give Lily an address she could invite herself to any time she pleases, and he tells Sammy as much. “Not this time. This is your place and she’s maybe not entirely pleased with me and the way I’ve been… and she’s probably right—hell, she is right—but the point is, I think a restaurant will be nice. Keep… keep everything polite.”

“Yourself included?”

“Oh, yes.” And he goes into the bedroom to make the call.

They meet Lily at the restaurant. Jack locates the bathroom right away and slides into the booth after Sammy, to give himself an easy escape. If he plays this right, he won’t need to excuse himself once.

He says, “Hey, Lily.”

Her lopsided smile under the booth light is wan. “Hey, loser. Good to finally see you.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. He has more time to say it how he wants to say it. “I’m gonna be around more. You’re trying and I haven’t been respecting that.”

“That’s very sentimental and patently untrue, but I’ll take it.” 

Sammy picks up the menu. Lily says, “So I finally get to meet him.”

“Yeah. Lily, this is Sammy. Sammy, my wonderful sister.” His gaze darts between their faces, trying to put a label on their expressions before anything can escalate.

“Wonderful, huh?” she says, reaching across the table to take Sammy’s hand. “Kind of thought you’d given up on me. I’m charmed,” she tells Sammy. “It’s been a while since Jack introduced me to a guy, and he’s a real catch, so you’re pretty lucky.”

“I’m the lucky one,” says Jack.

“I’ll make my own decision about that.”

“Okay, Lily,” insists Jack. “At least pretend you’re not gonna spend the whole night deciding whether my boyfriend’s right for me.”

“That’s not what I’m deciding.”

Jack remembers Sammy’s eyes wide in Lily’s apartment. He lets it go.

Under the shrewd gaze of Lily Wright, Journalist Extraordinaire, the evening goes down more like an investigation than a conversation. Jack takes Sammy’s hand and holds tightly.

She starts innocuous. “Jack says you have a cat.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s its name?”

“You’ll laugh.” When she raises a brow, Sammy says, sheepish, “Sammy Stevens, Jr.”

“Wow,” says Lily. “The ego on this man.”

“Your brother wants to name it Samira.”

“I hate to say this, because I remember Samira in Jack’s weird French noir movies class, he’s right,” Lily deadpans. “How old is it?”

“Roughly eight and a half.”

“How long have you been in New York?”

A beat. “About five months.”

Jack says, “We met just over a month after he made the move.”

“Okay. Where are you from?”

“Lily, come on. We haven’t even looked at our menus.” Jack isn’t sure he has his timeline right and doesn’t trust Lily to stop if she hits a nerve.

Sammy squeezes Jack’s hand. “No, it’s okay. I moved up from Florida. Did a bit of radio down there, but then I figured, really, the place to be is here. So here I am.”

Sammy relaxes as the conversation goes on, but he keeps his hand in Jack’s under the table until the food comes. He matches Lily’s snark with deadpan comebacks, unfazed by her abrasive nature, and laughs at Jack’s terrible jokes while Lily rolls her eyes.

And it begins to feel more comfortable, the three of them sharing a table, sharing air and space and garlic bread, while the night falls outside the windows.

At the door, Jack hugs Lily tightly and tells her he’ll see her soon. She shakes Sammy’s hand, giving him one last once-over, and shrugs.

“You be good to him, now,” she tells Sammy. “Make him really, really happy. Take the pressure off the rest of us.”

And Jack has to forcibly push her down the sidewalk to get her to go, grinning and unable to help it.

* * *

The next day Jack lets himself into his place with Lily before she rises. She’s spread out on the sofa, half-covered with a blanket, a dirty plate on the floor beside her feet. He stops in the front hall, taking his shoes off, and tells himself this is his home still.

He picks up the plate, turns the mic off, closes her laptop. He goes into the kitchen to search for breakfast food and gets distracted clearing away chip bags and moving shoes from beside the dishwasher into the hall.

He is acutely aware that he does not belong here, not anymore. But he stands over her on the sofa and says, “Lily. Hey, Lily,” over and over until she stirs.

She sits up immediately, then stares vacantly for a moment, holding up a hand as though conscious to tell him to wait. She rubs her eyes. “Jack?” she says. “Oh, fuck, I hate waking up in another dream.”

“Much as I would love to be Dream Jack, I’m definitely here,” says Jack.

“Oh, fuck,” says Lily, with a lot more vehemence. She looks at him, and her eyes clear up. “That is so much worse. At least when you’re around, I live like an actual human being.”

Jack laughs softly. “I will definitely not hold your lack of human-beingness against you. But I’m also leaving most of the mess for you to clean up.”

“Fair enough,” she says.

After she showers, her hair still sticking up everywhere, he presents her with a toasted bagel and the only jar of jam that isn’t completely congealed. With a bagel of his own, he sits down across from her, their table big enough to accommodate a cramped four, and then he reconsiders and sits beside her.

Lily says, tiredly, “I don’t get why you didn’t tell me.”

He spreads cream cheese slowly, grateful that when he looks up, he sees the window and not his sister. “It’s not as easy for me as it is for you.”

She laughs. “You think it’s easy for me? You think I don’t have all the same hang-ups as you, maybe more because a flirtatious woman is always predatory? You’re not the only one who was in that house, Jack. You’re not the only one with shit to work through.”

“No, I—I know. But I’ve seen you. You don’t second-guess yourself into a state of not being able to do anything at all, you just… you _swagger,_ Lily, my God. You’re a force of nature.”

“When don’t I second-guess myself? In high school? In college? Jack, it’s been years. Plus, let’s be honest, which one of us is in a relationship right now?”

“I can sense you want me to tell you it was easy, but it wasn’t.”

“Yeah,” says Lily. “Well. Thank God we’re across the country, then, huh?”

He takes her to the Museum of Natural History and lets her lead the way through the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs, watches from the balcony as she stands under the Great Blue with her arms out like a child, like she’s trying to measure the breadth of herself against the world. Like she doesn’t know what it looks like without him.

“So what did you think?” he says, munching on a street vendor hot dog. They’ve moseyed into a small park, where Lily manspreads on the bench beside Jack while he looks at the sky.

“Fucking museums are way too expensive for three hours of looking at dead things.”

Jack says, “It took a lot of time and effort to get those dead things into the museum.”

Lily waves him off. “Yeah, I know, I know, gotta pay all the archivists and researchers and curators. I know.”

“What did you think about him?”

She narrows her eyes, appraising him. “I think you’re going to have your hands full.”

Jack’s heart stutters, the shadows from the trees between them and the noisy street darker on his knees. Lily puts a hand on his chin and pushes his mouth closed. “What do you mean?” he says when he’s pushed her hand away.

“I know you, Jack Wright, up to your ears in love always, but you be careful not to let that man drain you.”

“He won’t.”

“You can promise that?”

Jack looks at her. “I can promise, because he loves just as much as he needs to be loved.”

He takes a bite and chews slowly, and she is quiet. He confesses. “I really want your approval.”

“Fret no longer, brother of mine. I am tentatively extending my approval.”

“Tentatively?”

“Mostly because I felt like I was doing him a disservice by not telling him that you’d eat him alive.”

“Hey!”

Lily says, “But if you want to send someone running for the woods, that’s your prerogative.”

“Just be happy for me, just… uncomplicatedly, honestly, really happy.”

“No, no, you have it. He’s a tough nut to crack, but you have it. It’s good to see you happy, even if I’m not seeing you as much as I’d like. And don’t worry, I gave him the talk about not breaking your heart or I’d break his face, yada yada, while you were peeing, so don’t fret about that either.”

“I’m glad you waited till I was out of the room for that,” says Jack.

“Like I said, tough nut to crack, because either he’s incredibly uptight or really, really shy—”

“He’s shy,” says Jack softly. “Well, it’s not really that he’s shy, more anxious, and he’s not out anywhere, to anyone, except me and now you. So you have to guard it with your life.”

“I will guard it with the honor of a medieval knight wearing the favor of his lady into battle,” says Lily solemnly.

“You have to guard it,” says Jack again, more forcefully.

“I will,” says Lily, an edge of defensiveness in her voice. “My lips are completely sealed.”

“Okay,” says Jack. “Okay. That’s fine. Good. Thanks, Lily.”

And she says, “I want to come over and see this place you’ve been living.”

* * *

But Jack keeps putting it off, and a few weeks later, Sammy gets a phone call. He isn’t expecting it, his phone face down on the kitchen counter. He and Jack are tangled together on the sofa, still in their pajamas after breakfast and kissing lazily, when the ringing starts. It’s Sammy’s generic ringtone, which doesn’t tell them much except that it’s not Ben.

“You gonna get that?” says Jack after about six rings. “Might be work.”

“Ugh,” says Sammy, grinning, and he extracts himself from Jack’s arms. Jack holds onto his fingers as long as he can. “Work can tell me in person.”

He makes a show of slumping into the kitchen, so by the time he reaches the phone, the call has gone silent. “See, nothing I can do about it now,” he tells Jack. Jack shrugs.

But Sammy turns the phone over, and his face goes ashy. “Shit.”

Jack leans forward, rises and then sinks back. “What’s the matter?”

Sammy takes a breath and it comes out shaky. “Nothing. It’s nothing, just the area code.”

“What’s area code?”

“Eight-one-three.”

“Eight-one…?” Jack says.

“Florida,” Sammy says stiffly.

“But it’s not a—not a number you recognize, is it?”

“No. Oh, but they left a voicemail. Shit.”

As far as Jack knows, Sammy cut every tie to a place he won’t call home. He talks sometimes about his job there and mentions his coworkers, but that was temporary, a space into which he settled while he searched for a door out.

Now, while they are looking at each other over the phone, the phone rings. Sammy jumps so hard he almost drops it, a panicked expression on his face.

“You don’t have to take it,” Jack says.

“I don’t have to take it,” Sammy echoes, and puts the phone to his ear.

“Hello,” he says tersely.

The silence in the apartment gets bigger, draws Jack’s attention to the A/C and the sound of footsteps in the apartment above theirs. Sammy doesn’t move.

“What the fuck do you want?” Sammy deadpans. His wild eyes meet Jack’s, and he mouths _bedroom._

Jack watches him go, his shoulders like mountains or prison bars. Sammy slams the bedroom door behind him, and the sound of it echoes through the apartment, shakes Jack to his bones.

Jack gets up and goes to the bookcase, but he can’t find a single book he wants to read. All of his he knows, and all of Sammy’s are too much Sammy’s. It isn’t right to read something Sammy loves while Sammy is taking a call that’s turning him inside out. Instead, Jack goes into the bathroom to wash up.

Sammy comes out of the bedroom long after the noise has ceased, the silence and the interspersed expletives. The call can’t have taken more than ten minutes, and the voicemail less than two. Sammy’s face is dark, his brows drawn and his eyes full of fire. He’s changed into sweatpants and swings his sneakers from their laces.

Jack says, softly, “Was it—?”

Sammy slams a hand against the wall. “Yeah, my _fucking_ parents.”

Jack wants to ask, _What did they want?_ but doesn’t. He sits down beside Sammy on the floor and touches his shoulder. “Block them. We can go change your number—”

Sammy laughs. It’s bitter, but it’s not aimed at Jack. “I have a career here, I can’t just up and change my number. Besides, it’s a new phone, new number, already. I called in sick, so go to work without me. I… Jesus. I’m going for a walk, or a run or something.”

“Yeah, um, that’s fine. Sure you don’t want me—?”

“No. I need to be alone to think.”

“Are you okay?” says Jack, and it sounds hollow in his mouth.

“Look,” sighs Sammy, “I’ll tell you when you get home.” He kisses Jack quick and is out the door. Jack watches him disappear around the corner, and slowly, softly, closes the door. The cat weaves around his legs, and he picks her up and carries her all through the house as he tries to remember the things he’s supposed to do and in what order.

But at dinner Sammy is still withdrawn. He keeps looking out the window, as though trying to appraise all of New York based on the darkening vision from the eighth floor of the cheapest one-bedroom he could find on short notice.

“Sammy,” Jack has to say at the beginning of every sentence. Sammy’s phone is nowhere to be seen, Jack’s left on the coffee table. As the meal goes on, Jack allows the quiet to grow, to give Sammy time to breathe.

When Sammy finally speaks, his voice is low and labored. “Where was I supposed to go? If it’s not enough to sell all my shit and get on a plane with two suitcases like I was in college again, except I didn’t have the balls or the savings to go to college out of state, what the fuck am I supposed to do? How the fuck am I supposed to get. The _fuck._ Away?”

“Sammy. If they call again, give the phone to me. I’ll tell them a thing or two.”

Sammy’s voice rises, strained, helpless. “I don’t want you talking to them.”

Jack says, “I know a bit about shutting down assholes from my sister—not because my sister is an asshole, but because she’s a master of shutting them down—and they sound like just about the biggest assholes on the planet, and trust me, trust me, you do not have to worry about me letting them know anything you don’t want them to know.”

Sammy says Jack’s name with such exhaustion that Jack falls silent. “It’s not worth it. Just… let sleeping dogs lie. If I’m lucky, it’ll never happen again.”

“And if you’re not?” Jack prompts.

“Then I know the number, and I won’t be fooled again.”

Sammy clears the table, and then he doesn’t come out of the kitchen for a long time. Jack listens a long time for water running onto the pile of dishes into the sink, for the soft, wet give of the refrigerator door, for Sammy’s bare feet on the tile.

“Want some help?” Jack calls, but he hears nothing in response.

He leaves the vacant table and the cat follows him into the kitchen. Sammy is sitting on the floor, leaning against a cupboard with his arms around his knees. His face is red, his cheeks raw, and he stares at the dark oven in front of him. The cleared dishes sit above him on the counter, stacked neatly.

Jack lingers in the doorway, and, slowly, Sammy turns his head and looks at him. Even his eyes are red. He reaches out an absent hand and the cat trails her tail underneath it. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he looks so much like he’s about to start crying that Jack covers his mouth so he won’t cry himself.

Instead, Jack sits opposite Sammy in the narrow kitchen, their knees brushing, and rests a hand on Sammy’s knee.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” says Jack.

“I have everything to be sorry about,” says Sammy miserably.

“Okay, like what?”

Sammy looks away. “I… My whole everything, generally?”

“Okay, not true. Your whole everything is generally, entirely, wonderful.”

“It’s not even like they said anything horrible, anything I could repeat and you’d think it was horrible. Just don’t—I’m not making it all up.”

“You’re not,” Jack says. “Oh, Sammy, you’re not. And I would think it was horrible, because it was. It wasn’t okay, what they put you through, none of it.”

Sammy leans forward and rests his head on his knees, and Jack stretches out his feet, which, in the small kitchen, brush the cabinets opposite him. And they are silent like this, Sammy’s shoulders shaking, the living room clock ticking softly, the old cat considering the best route around her two humans to the late-evening warmth of the bed.

And then, abruptly, Sammy pulls his knees down. He shifts, the whole kitchen shuddering like a breaker with the motion, and then Sammy’s head is in Jack’s lap. Jack adjusts his limbs to better accommodate Sammy and looks down at him. Despite the light shining clearly on Sammy’s face, he looks gaunt, his face hollowed out.

“That can’t be comfortable,” Jack says with a breathy laugh.

“Shh,” Sammy tells him. “I’m very comfortable.” His knees press against Jack’s legs, his hand reaching around Jack’s waist. Jack strokes his hair until his breathing evens out, until Sammy turns and lies flat on the tile. He stretches his feet out into the hall, looking up at Jack, eyes red and soft. One hand reaches back for the cat to sniff.

“I love you,” says Jack. He watches the shiver run through Sammy. “I love every bit of you.”

Sammy’s voice is thick with shame. “Even this?”

“Even this. Always. Even this.”

And maybe Jack could do it better if he went back, maybe he could take the call instead of Sammy, maybe he could stay home from work with Sammy so he wouldn’t have to go through it alone, but he cannot change other people. He could not stop the call from coming.

And he doesn’t want to watch Sammy go through this twice.

* * *

Months pass. Winter falls heavy outside and snowplows sliding on the boulevards, everyone dressed up black as a funeral party in their ankle coats and hats and sharp New York eyes, and it is a relief to take his gloves off in the warmth of Sammy’s apartment. Sammy is still asleep when Jack returns from a long evening with Lily, all the lights out.

Jack leaves his shoes and pushes the bedroom door open slowly. Even with all the lights in the house off, he can see Sammy perfectly in the yellow glow of streetlights, the covers tangled beneath him and his hair across the pillow, his lips parted. He is beautiful, and Jack wants to wake up beside him every morning for the rest of his life.

Jack sits on the edge of the bed and pulls the covers up over Sammy’s shoulders. He takes one of Sammy’s hands and holds it in his lap, trying to figure out how to make voice and breath and intention all coincide with love. Closing his eyes, he listens to the gentle rhythm of Sammy’s breath.

He wants to do this right the first time.

“Sammy,” he says, and Sammy stirs. His fingers twitch under Jack’s.

Jack holds his breath for a moment. He whispers, “Would you like to marry me?”

Sammy grumbles something unintelligible, then something Jack can make out, voice blurry: “Shh, I’m sleeping.”

Jack laughs as softly as he can, and Sammy shifts.

Jack says Sammy’s name slowly, over and over, until Sammy blinks open his eyes. For a moment, they look at nothing, then they focus on Jack.

“Wake up,” says Jack. “Wake up. Come and have a chat. I’ve got something important to ask you.”

Sammy reaches up and rubs his face. “Can’t it wait till morning?”

“It can, but I want to ask you now. I might lose my nerve in the light, and I don’t want to.”

“I’m awake,” says Sammy. He looks up at Jack, eyes wide and soft. He takes Jack’s hand in his and places it on his cheek. His face is clear, but anxiety inches toward the lines around his eyes. “I’m here.”

Jack takes a breath, turns the words over in his head, places them in the right order. The night is dark and Sammy is looking at him with those ocean eyes blue as the Atlantic. Jack says, “Sammy Stevens, do you want to marry me?”

All the breath leaves Sammy at once. He leans back on the pillow and stares at the ceiling, bites his lip and releases it.

Jack is looking at all his failings, holding them before Sammy without so much as a ribbon, and he is watching Sammy do the same. He is watching Sammy weigh every fear and how they would be exacerbated by a ring on his finger, the heft of every overt lie. Jack knows what he is asking, and he is suddenly sorry.

He holds his breath. He isn’t going to say it, not yet. He wants to do this right.

“Yes,” Sammy whispers.

“Yes?” Jack whispers back.

Sammy’s voice is clear. “Yes. More than anything. Jack Wright, I want to marry you.”

Jack ducks his head, beaming. “That’s good,” he breathes. “That’s wonderful. Thank you, that’s…”

“A plan?” Sammy asks sleepily.

“Let’s go with that. It’s a plan.”

Jack removes his jacket and shirt, and Sammy watches him. “Gimme some of the covers, you hog,” he laughs, pulling his shoes off.

“Not a chance. This is what you have to live with forever.”

“Yeah,” says Jack, and breathes in the sound of it. “Forever.”

Sammy holds the covers up and Jack slides underneath, holding Sammy just far enough away to see his face. Under the blankets, their bodies are hot. Yellow shadows fall on Sammy’s face, and Jack reaches up to brush them away.

Sammy, still looking at him with wonder in his eyes, reaches out and rests his palm on Jack’s neck, stroking his jaw. His knuckles settle in the hollow of Jack’s collarbones.

“Thank you for asking me,” says Sammy.

“My fiancé,” says Jack, and it sounds like a song, a promise, a secret shared here in the dead of the night, waiting for the morning.


	3. Chapter 3

He doesn’t tell Lily about the engagement right away, but he buys Sammy a ring. He spends the morning preparing to lie to the jeweler, and then he goes into the jeweler’s and lies, and even though he comes out feeling like he’s been pressed inside a crate for the past twenty-five years, it is worth it to have that little velvet box in his coat pocket.

He wants it to belong to just him and Sammy, wants to see the shape of a space that is just theirs in the city.

Sammy wears the ring on a cord around his neck for a year, tucked inside his band t-shirts and his horrible flannels. It falls on the pillows between them at night, catches reflected light from neighboring buildings in the mornings, and Jack thinks, _He’s mine, he wants to be mine,_ every time he sees it.

* * *

“What do you think about starting your own show?” Jack starts asking. Today he is asking it while tying his shoes.

“Come on,” says Sammy. “I’m not that good.”

And Jack remembers a first meeting lost to time, someone behind him saying, _You’re good, Sammy, you’re really good,_ and Jack not knowing. Not knowing the rugged velvet Sammy would bring to the microphone, the mischievousness, the cunning glint in his eye when he got an idea.

Not knowing who he would wake up next to and how he would shiver to see that smile.

“You think I don’t listen to the tapes?” Jack laughs. “I know how good you are, and you can’t change my mind.”

Sammy stands and opens the front door, ruffling Jack’s hair. Jack reaches up to swat the hand away, but Sammy trails his fingers across Jack’s palm and slows him long enough to kiss.

Sammy has his thinking face on in the elevator, brow furrowed in a way Jack has learned to read and eyes full of light. They cross the lobby in silence. In the lobby they are not boyfriends; they are anonymous, bodies in the New York crush.

“Are you giving me a promotion?” Sammy asks when they’re out on the street.

“Not unless you take it, because if you say yes…”

“You’ll be my producer?” Sammy bites his lip and looks at the sky, and it’s so adorable Jack runs his hand through his hair to force himself to look away. But Jack can’t stop himself smiling.

Jack says, the smile so heavy in his voice the words barely come out, “Well, maybe.”

“Okay, you’re just looking for an excuse to not let me out of your sight,” says Sammy.

Jack scoffs as they pause at the subway entrance. “I’m not that clingy.”

“Sure sounds like it to me,” says Sammy, voice thick with sarcasm.

They navigate their way through the throng of subwaygoers, not talking until they reach their platform.

“Jack,” says Sammy seriously as the wrong train hurtles past. They are very close, and Jack waits for the fear to slice through him. The tunnels stretch on to nowhere and everywhere, and everyone’s eyes look like animals’. “Give the job to your sister. I would love to be produced by you, but I have a job that I’m happy with and she, well.”

“I’ve asked her. She turned me down,” says Jack. Their train screeches to a stop, and they push their way in. “Also, she’s not answering her phone.”

Sammy stares at him. “How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know, a – a few days? A week. Yeah. I’ll say a week.”

Sammy’s eyebrow goes up. In the packed subway car, they shudder against each other, chest to chest.

Jack says, “I was going to pay her a visit anyway. But don’t think you’re second-best.”

So after work, after Sammy gets off at his stop, Jack stays on the train for another four. It’s black outside, and Jack zips up his coat as he walks. Every step shoots toothpicks up his legs. He is so aware of his body, of the sound his feet make on the sidewalk, his breath white in the air, his hand curled around the keychain in his pocket.

His old place seems unfamiliar somehow, a heavy-bodied beast, even though every step he takes is a step he’s taken a thousand times toward a place he could always call home. The laundromat is dark, and the television flickers in Lily’s living room. Blue light falls on him perfectly as he approaches the front door.

He lets himself in.

He flicks the hall light on to get Lily’s attention, and listens to the series of thuds, scrapes, and expletives coming from the living room.

“Don’t hurt yourself, it’s just me,” Jack says.

Lily is a blur of motion, and then her arms fall around his shoulders. She holds on tight, pressing her cheek into his neck, her hair unwashed and scratchy and her bare feet against his. He reaches up and holds her close.

“I didn’t think you were ever coming home,” she says in a fierce mumble.

“It hasn’t been that long.”

“It has. Weeks is long, Jack. You pay rent, so your ass had better sleep here more than once a month.”

He wants to say, _That’s not fair,_ but that wouldn’t be fair of him. “Why don’t you answer the phone?”

She laughs. “Look at this place.” In the pink light of the television freeze-frame and the hall overhead, Jack can only see the long shadows of Lily’s mess.

She says, “Look at me.”

If her hair was growing out before, now it’s the choppy cut of a girl in the bathroom with kitchen scissors. She’s dressed business sloppy, blouse unbuttoned to her stomach, a pale stain on the chest.

“Tell me you didn’t go out like that,” says Jack.

“The stain’s definitely new. And the slippers. And the—” She looks down and touches the front of her bra. “And that, yeah. I was definitely more presentable outside the house. Anyway, I’m the one who’s supposed to be worrying about you – and you’d better know that I’m worrying.”

“I…” Lily knocking on the door to Jack’s childhood bedroom when he’d been crying, late at night after the parents had gone to sleep; Lily driving him to the edge of town after a bad grade; Lily standing between him and their parents when they so much as snapped at him, abrasive even then. Jack says, “Every time you don’t answer the phone, I worry myself sick. It’s always gone both ways. Hell, if you called me at work, I’d pick up.”

“You spend that much time worrying about me?” Something in her voice makes him uneasy, the lapse in her confidence.

“Jack and Lily vs. the world.”

Her lips smile, but she doesn’t laugh.

They end up in Jack’s room, which, at the back of the building, oversees a narrow alleyway. Jack sits on the bed and opens the window to the fire escape while Lily paces the room. The room still has most of his decorations, because he doesn’t need them at Sammy’s, which makes it look like a sad adolescent relic.

He says, “Lily, what’s happened? You can’t—this isn’t because you can’t find work.”

“My podcast audience doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with me, Jack, and I’d appreciate if you’d take that cue from them, at least.”

“Oh, that’s gotten off the ground?” says Jack.

“You bet it has. I’m—”

“The cleverest, most incisive and quick-witted journalist in the tri-state area, and certainly in New York?”

Lily’s laugh is bright and sharp, but something in it makes Jack uneasy. “You’ve got it.”

Jack glances out the window, where the neighbor has a nightlight on, nothing stirring but the curtain. “So I guess you won’t want your own show at my station.”

She falls silent, the only sound in the room her steady footsteps and the wind. “You came all this way to offer me the job? I don’t need you pity, and I don’t want it.”

“I’m not saying… I think your life is falling apart, and I’m afraid of what I’ll see the next time I talk to you, but we’d be in the same room, and I wouldn’t have to hope that you’d pick up the phone or that you’re—”

“Dead in a bush in Central Park?”

“Something like that.”

“Also, you literally just said what you said you weren’t saying.”

This isn’t going how he wanted it to. He says, “I’ll be right back,” and gestures toward the bathroom, so Lily lets him go. He finds himself in her room and climbs into the closet, pulling the doors closed until he sees nothing but black.

He comes back. He goes to sit with Lily in his bedroom, and then he has another idea. He climbs out the window, the air still and sweet.

“You coming?” he calls back.

Lily joins him and sits on the steps. Overhead, the brightest stars can be seen in the narrow gap between buildings, but since their building is one of the shortest, they have the most stars. Suddenly Lily looks about five years younger, like she looked in college, in that little room with its mics and sound boards, their show together, before the city pulled them apart. She puts her feet against the posts, and Jack leans back against the guard rail.

“I feel bad,” he says, and keeps his eyes on the stars. “I really do. You need me and I’m not… I’m not here all the time, or even most of the time. And I guess that’s why I’m saying you should come work with me at the studio.”

The wind rustles through his jacket, across his exposed ankles. He wraps his arms around his chest.

Lily says, “If this is some pity ploy, Jack, save it for someone who’d appreciate it.”

“It’s not. But if you want to turn the podcast into a real radio show, I have an opening and I don’t want to fill it with someone who’d put me to sleep.”

“Please just say what you mean.”

“I mean I want to produce you. I miss our college days. I miss you.”

“And whose fault is that?” Her voice runs through him like the night breeze.

He forces himself to keep talking. “Point fingers if you want, Lily, but I’m here apologizing. Over two decades of you being the most important person in my life is never going to go away. You are in every way irreplaceable.”

“I’m not going to argue this point with you, Jack, even though I should, because you seem incapable of recognizing the damage you’ve done.”

Jack sits on the platform in front of her, looking at her knees, shame heavy in his throat. The light through the window makes her face look gaunt.

He says, “No, I think I’m recognizing it. I have a partner and I’m living with him most of the time. But I can only do my part.” He can only stretch his hand so far out in the dark, while Lily shifts like an image in double vision. “I can’t singlehandedly pull you out of whatever dark place you’re in, so I need you to let me know what it is.”

She laughs, short and bitter.

“I’m serious. You’re not losing me, so don’t let me lose you. There is always more room for love.”

She sniffs and wipes her nose with her knuckles. “Sappy and patently untrue, but at least you sound like the Jack I know.”

“Please don’t think I’m replacing you. I’m always gonna love you, no matter where I go or who else I love.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Lily, gentle as a handwave. “I’ll take it to heart. And I love you, too, kid, but you have your own life now. You don’t have to worry about me or my feelings. I can handle myself.”

And it’s what he’s been saying, except on Lily’s tongue it means, _Let me fall apart._ It means, _Leave me to the fire so I can show you how deep the burns go_ _._

Below them, he hears a scrabbling. A stray dog picks around at the heap of garbage bags beside the bin, its fur white and mangy. Jack can see it through the platform: everything in this city broken, everything trying to find a way to live, to carve out a place to belong.

He wants to be a place where Lily can belong. He says, “Do you want to take the job?”

She sighs dramatically and crosses her legs. “I want to.”

“So?” says Jack hopefully.

“Fine. But only because I wasn’t made for producing on my own.”

Jack throws his head back and breathes out slow. “You know, I can work with that.”

They sit in silence, listening to the foraging dog and neighbors’ television sets blaring. In his head, Jack arranges all the things he has to say next, afraid that it will undo the new bridge between him and his sister. Afraid that this is not the place to say it, that the words will come out of his mouth backwards, that he’ll lose her forever.

He looks down, picking at the platform. His voice is a whisper. “And I wanted your blessing.”

The wind picks up around them, and she says nothing. Finally, he raises his head, just for a moment, to see her shrewd eyes searching for his. Taking a shuddering breath, he closes his eyes again.

She says. “My blessing.”

“Yeah,” Jack manages. “I asked Sammy to marry me.”

She looks away, through the open window to a bedroom that seems more vacant every time he looks at it. She is severe in profile, brows heavy over steely eyes. But her voice is soft. “Marry you. Wow. That’s quite the step, Jack Wright.”

“Taking the plunge,” says Jack with bravado he’s learned from Lily.

Lily turns back to him and chuckles. “You evil man. That’s what this whole thing was about. You were just trying to butter me up.”

Jack says, “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Yeah, yeah, you can say whatever you want.”

“I really, really do want to marry him.” He can’t help the grin that pulls at his cheeks.

She reaches her hands out and Jack takes them. “How could I ever withhold my blessing when you’re smiling like that. Better be careful not to split your face in two.”

When he gets home, well past two a.m., Sammy is waiting at the dining room table, stirring whipped cream into hot chocolate. The lights above him and in the front hall are on for Jack, everywhere else dark.

“How did it go?” says Sammy.

Jack takes hangs his jacket in the closet, drops his bag, and unties his shoes without taking his eyes off Sammy. “She said she’ll do it. Is the water still hot in the kettle?”

Sammy nods. Jack goes over and kisses him. Then he heads into the kitchen to pour himself a mug. Jack says, “And she said she’s happy to give me away, walk me down the aisle if our parents won’t come and everything.”

Sammy’s voice is breathless when he says, “You asked about that, did you?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s do it,” Sammy says, almost giddy.

Jack laughs, hot chocolate spilling onto his fingers. He sets the mug beside Sammy’s on the table, and says, “You stayed up to say this, didn’t you, babe?”

“Maybe,” says Sammy.

Jack presses a hand to his mouth, but he can’t look away from Sammy. “Yes, Sammy, yes. Let’s get married.”

And Sammy, reaching for Jack’s collar, pulls him into a long kiss, both of them smiling so hard it’s all teeth and hot breaths.

When they draw away, Sammy pulls the cord over his head, undoes the knot, and drops the little silver band in his palm. In his hand it is everything, every promise, every whispered _I love you,_ every locked door between them and the world unlocking as Sammy holds it.

He looks up at Jack, his smile matching Jack’s or surpassing it, all of the sun held in one man, radiant and beautiful. He presses it into Jack’s hand, and Jack slips the ring onto Sammy’s finger.

* * *

The day of the wedding, Lily meets them outside Sammy’s in her nicest dress, or at least the nicest dress she would brave the subway in. It’s early spring and the stark trees are turning to flowers overhead. Jack has to keep stopping to brush flower petals off Sammy’s shoulders, out of his hair. And it holds his breath captive in his throat, because he is realizing that he will have simple moments like these, moments of brushing petals off Sammy’s shoulders, for the rest of his life.

Jack insists they stop by a florist. He wants to give Sammy something wonderful and decked in flowers to remember. Because, underneath the suit he had tailored for the occasion, Sammy is wearing the same blue shirt he met Jack in, the florist provides them with two blue boutonnieres. Sammy’s is streaked with the color of midnight and Jack’s is a pastel, soft like a painted sky.

Jack can’t stop staring at Sammy with wonder light as anything in his throat, and he keeps catching the same look in Sammy’s eyes. Even in the vulgar ordinariness of the subway, Sammy is radiant and magnificent.

Ben is waiting outside the Marriage Bureau, his hair combed down but already sticking up in places, kicking crumbs and cigarette butts toward scornful pigeons. The sight of the building pulls Jack up short, and Sammy has to pull him out of the street as he stares up at it. They will walk in that building as two people and come out as one.

They wait inside the building while the few attendants arrive: Mary, a mutual friend of Lily’s from college, and her husband and two kids; Professor Sheffield (also from college), Ron (recently moved to Long Island), Debbie (Jack’s upperclassman mentor his first two years in NY); no one from the station.

The justice of the peace, a clean-shaven man of about forty-five, meets them on the third floor. Jack holds his breath the whole way up, his hand in Sammy’s, not caring, for the first time in his life, who sees.

The room is small and spare, walls a gentle grey, with a single pulpit and an abstract painting on one of the walls, large enough to fit a cramped crowd of twenty. Sammy hesitates in the doorway, Jack half a step in front of him, still hand-in-hand.

“You okay?” Jack says softly.

“Yeah, I’m… let me take it in. I want to freeze-frame every moment of today.”

So Jack kisses him, quick and soft, right there between their life before and their life after marriage.

With every heartbeat the room becomes more and more intimate, the justice at the pulpit while Jack and Sammy face each other in front of it and the eyes of the attendants feel less like eyes and more like lights. The world is dazzling, and Jack can’t imagine it ever dulling down.

Sammy takes a bracing breath and says his vows first. Jack holds Sammy’s eyes, every blink a half-second he is not looking at Sammy, and Sammy’s eyes are so blue, so wet, so full of love. The words fall over him like water, like flower petals, like the stream of forever pooling at his feet.

The most important words he has ever and will ever hear.

When Sammy gets to, “You are my home, Jack Wright,” Jack starts crying. He is holding Sammy’s hands, but Sammy extracts one of his and presses it to Jack’s cheek. And then Jack ends up hiccupping out his own vows, Sammy’s hand never once leaving his face.

Lily hands them the rings, and Jack puts Sammy’s on his palm, the weight of their promise contained in a band so small it weighs nothing at all. There is no room around them, only this ring and Sammy standing so close and the promises hanging around their shoulders like winter coats in a snowstorm.

“With this ring, I give you my heart,” Jack murmurs. His hands tremble so much he can barely fit the ring on Sammy’s finger, and Sammy’s tremble in return. Sammy stares at it in wonder, stares at Jack in wonder, lips parting.

Sammy lifts his hand, still in Jack’s, and stares at them, before rolling the other ring between his fingers. “With this ring,” Sammy whispers, then he clears his throat and says it again, louder, surer. Jack’s fingers twitch, the ring cold on the tip of his finger. Something is making a wonderful racket in his chest. “I give you my heart. Forever and ever.”

“By the power vested in me by the State of New York,” says the justice, “I now pronounce you husband and husband. You may kiss.”

And they do, deep and slow, one of Jack’s hands on Sammy’s chest so he can feel the heart thudding through the tuxedo and Sammy cupping Jack’s face, cradling the back of his neck, not a sound in the world but their heartbeats and their breath soft against each other’s faces.

There is not a thing that Jack would change.

* * *

And in their living room, their jackets stripped off and flung over the dining room chairs, collars unbuttoned and ties loosened, Jack pulls up _Yellow_ on his phone and they dance. They keep the blinds open as they slide across the carpet in their socks, breathless, tipsy, shoulders stained with sweat. Their laughter forms a drumbeat that pulses through their chests.

For the first time they want the city to see them, in all its dazzling yellows and pulsing electric hearts, their heartbeats in the brief gaps between their bodies louder than the millions of cabs, dogwalkers, graffiti artists shaking their cans in the night, teenagers out on skateboards just discovering how it feels to fall in love.

Facedown on the table, Jack’s phone crones, _You know, you know I love you so._

Jack kisses Sammy’s mouth, his cheek, his jaw, his neck, keeps kissing him until his eyes droop and Sammy has to walk him to bed, both of them giggling softly, Jack saying, “My husband,” and Sammy saying, “My husband,” back. And still they dance.

 _I love you so,_ goes the phone from the other room, chasing them into sleep.

* * *

Lily doesn’t call much after the wedding, but Ben comes around a lot. He’s younger than Jack by a few years, enthusiastic as a child in a swimming pool, and he bumps into at least three people he knows in the hallway to Sammy and Jack’s.

He’s the sort of person Jack would have drifted toward in college, never quiet, frame bunched with the kind of energy a run won’t dispel. Every time he visits, the three of them laugh so hard Jack is sure they’re going to have a noise complaint.

And the place is Sammy and Jack’s, now. Jack took his name off the place with Lily, though with the income from the station, she’s able to pay rent herself until she finds a roommate. Jack brings all his things over. He and Sammy carry them together through the subway, but everything that is Jack-and-Lily’s he leaves with Lily.

She stands in the kitchen as they come and go, or lounges in the living room, or moves the laundry along, and tells Jack to leave her favorite mug but that he can have that horrible ginger tea she bought on a whim. He leaves the sheets for Lily’s roommate but takes the old blanket from college and the succulents on the living room windowsill. The way they divvy up their belongings feels like a severance.

Before he takes his last armful home, he tells Lily to call.

Lily has a weekly slot in Jack’s studio, and the days in between she uses to dig up and refine her stories. She does this alone, speaking sporadically to any of her friends, diving down the tunnel of information, and sometimes it takes everything in Jack not to call her six times successively, just to hear her voice on the answering machine.

Lily sits across the table from Jack with eyes steely and full of fire, and her voice takes the world apart. She grins into her mic. She brings in her papers but she only glances at them in the heartbeat between topics, like the story is a song and she knows all the words. And because she is his last show of the day, Jack takes Lily home, hugs her in the doorway and takes the subway back alone.

Oh, it is good to see her alive.

* * *

One day, months later, every married morning monumental, Jack asks, “Do you want to start a family?” It is late evening, after work, and he is on the stepstool, measuring the wall to hang a painting. Sammy sits on the armchair, eating leftovers, but when Jack turns, he catches Sammy’s wide eyes. Sammy is still, and there is a very old fear in his careful voice.

“You mean kids?” Sammy says.

“Well,” Jack says slowly. “A kid. I don’t mean right now, but I wanted to put it on the table. I’ve always. Well. I thought it would be nice to be a dad. If you want to.”

Sammy tugs on a lock of hair, looking away for so long that Jack turns back to the wall to give him privacy. The weight of Sammy’s silence is heavy on his shoulders, that brooding moment caught like a Polaroid behind Jack’s eyelids.

“I don’t know, Jack,” says Sammy. “We’re young.”

“No, I—I know.” He wants to turn and look at Sammy, to see whatever is going across his face, but he just turned away. “Of course there’s time to figure these things out.”

He hears a clink and turns anyway to see Sammy set the plate on the coffee table and rise.

“I’m going to bed,” Sammy announces. Jack can’t read anything in Sammy’s voice, which means Sammy has worked hard to maintain neutrality.

It is so abrupt it pulls Jack up short. Sammy gets up and passes Jack on his way to the bedroom. The door clicks softly shut behind him, leaving Jack with the picture frame against his knees and the room empty behind him, letting the night in.

By the time Jack pushes the bedroom door open, Sammy is under the covers, jeans and all. The lights are off, so all Jack can see from the doorway is the bunched-up shape of the comforter.

“Do you mind if I come in?” says Jack.

The covers shift, and Sammy makes a low, noncommittal sound.

“If you need time, that’s—”

“No, it’s okay.”

Jack leaves the door open so he can see and pulls the covers over himself. His body slots in behind Sammy’s like it was built to fit there. He wraps an arm around Sammy’s waist and presses his lips against the back of Sammy’s neck. “You can just say no.”

Sammy shivers. “I have to explain it. It’s not as simple as yes or no.”

“It could be,” says Jack. “I’m not gonna pressure you to raise a kid if you have doubts, any doubts at all. But… I have all night—the rest of my life—so take your time, explaining.”

Sammy pulls his knees up and ducks his head, his neck stretching mountainous away from Jack.

Jack says, gently, “Sammy. Sammy. I love you. You don’t have to want a family beyond you and me. Okay? You don’t have to.”

Sammy mumbles assent.

And Jack stays that way for minutes, kissing Sammy’s neck. Finally, he says, “Sammy, what’s wrong?”

“I’d fuck a kid up,” Sammy says miserably.

Jack’s lips still on Sammy’s spine, goosebumps all up Sammy’s neck. Jack is aware of every breath, of how hot it bounces back at him. His words are softer than a whisper. “Oh. Baby. No. No, no, you wouldn’t.”

The words come out of Sammy like a leaky faucet, him trying to stop them at every turn. “I—I’m scared, Jack. I’m scared I’m going to fuck you up, too, or that I have and… we don’t know it yet.”

“Baby,” says Jack. “You haven’t fucked me up. You’ve made me better.”

Sammy continues. “I don’t want… I don’t want to hurt anyone. A kid. I don’t want to be the reason someone hates themselves.”

He’s warm against Jack’s chest, his breathing erratic. A cold goes through Jack. “Sammy…”

“I wouldn’t know how to be good to them.”

“You’re not going to be your parents,” says Jack. “You’re not your parents. You’re going to be good, and I know this because you want to be. Hey. Look at me. Look at me.”

Sammy’s eyes are almost black when he rolls over to face Jack. Jack runs his finger over Sammy’s lips, soft and chapped.

“You are a kind man, Sammy Stevens, and thoughtful, and of everyone I know I think I’d trust you most with a child. After all, I trusted you with me, and I was scared out of my mind at first, and you have been nothing but gentle and loving.”

“I can’t,” says Sammy, voice thick, and Jack realizes how close he is to crying.

“We don’t have to,” says Jack quickly. “We don’t have to. That’s okay. You’re not a bad person.”

“But you want it,” says Sammy.

“That doesn’t make you bad. It doesn’t mean you’ve disappointed me in any way. I want you to be happy, I want to be happy with you.”

Sammy bites his lip and squeezes his eyes shut, but then Jack sees his wet cheeks catching the hall light. Sammy looks a million years old, the bags under his eyes blending into the rest of his face, his lips parted. He looks like there is something he needs to say pushing against the roof of his mouth, something he needs confirmation of, his eyes wide as anything.

“You can tell me,” Jack whispers.

Sammy speaks haltingly, eyes flitting away from Jack’s only to return. “You’re not upset? Because I…?”

“Because you what?”

“Because I’m not giving you what you want.”

Jack leans close enough that his nose brushes Sammy’s. “No, God, Sammy, of course I’m not.” But Sammy doesn’t look convinced, so Jack says, “You’re everything I want. You’re the family I chose, and I’m choosing you right now. Okay? I’m happy, really happy, so don’t think… don’t think I love you any less because you don’t want a kid. I gave you my heart, remember?”

“Yeah,” says Sammy, “I know.”

“Then it’s settled,” says Jack. “No kid. It’s always gonna be The Sammy and Jack Show.”

And Sammy laughs, so it’s a good night.

* * *

At six and a half, Bella Jensen, daughter of Mary and Tim, is precocious, bright-eyed, and already a performer. She’s found a hefty stick on the ground, about twice the length of an average singer’s microphone, and is belting into it in her high-pitched voice, twirling around the pathway. She darts ahead of them but comes back to sing the newest nonsensical refrain of the song she keeps building onto. Already, she is using words Jack hasn’t heard since college.

She runs ahead of Mary and Jack on the path, the aquarium just out of sight at the end of the park, while her brother, Tim, Jr., holds his mother’s hand.

He’s reserved as his father, wide-eyed, waving a plastic dolphin in front of him and not looking where he’s going.

“He likes to make an opinion when he’s got all the available evidence,” Mary explains.

“Are you gonna tell me what you think of the aquarium, little guy?” says Jack.

Little Tim looks up at him and says, solemnly, “I’ve been in the aquarium before.”

“They’re so grown up,” Jack comments. “Jeez, I remember when Bella was an infant.”

“Yeah, they grow up quick,” says Mary. “Thanks for tagging along, by the way. With Tim’s conference and the kids being out of summer camp for the week, it’s been a lot of help, having you and Sammy around.”

“Well, you know I love them.” This is Jack’s chance. He says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, shoot.”

“How did you decide to start a family? I know you were in college, and Tim, he stayed at home, didn’t he?”

Mary laughs and looks down at Little Tim. “It honestly was a surprise to both of us when I found out we were gonna have Bella. We hadn’t been talking about having kids yet. Tim and I were serious and had been since high school, but…” She sighs. “When you’re that young, a family can feel like the end of the world. Or, rather, the end of all that freedom you were hoping for when you left home in the first place.”

“Yeah, but you were thrilled. God, even Lily was thrilled when you’d bring Bella around. And I didn’t even think she was a kids person. Actually, that’s not right, she definitely isn’t a kids person. It’s hard to believe Tim dropped out.”

“Really? He loved those kids something fierce the moment he saw them. He’d give the world, and he already has. But he went back to school a few years ago and got his Associates. Says he’s happy with that. Of course we have two, now, and they’re a handful enough we decided to hold off on that insurance baby.”

“Insurance baby?”

Mary laughs, warm as steaming tea on a cold day. “It was Tim’s idea, this silly old thing. He sat me down one day, you’re not going to believe this, he told me that in case one of the kids turned out a genius and the other… less so… we, and these are his words, we wouldn’t want the dumb one to feel left out. Can you believe that man? Well, you’d best believe I saw through in a heartbeat.”

Jack joins her in laughter, while Bella skips down the path.

“Honey,” calls Mary as Bella reaches a fork in the road. “Stay where your mommy can see you.”

Bella turns and sings a refrain in response (the words: _why are adults so slow?_ ), but she trudges back nonetheless. She skips circles around them as they reach the road at the end of the park.

“You’re just going to have to give me the kids for a couple mornings this week,” Jack says.

“You just come around any time. Seriously, Jack, what’s this all about?” says Mary, laughing. “You and Sammy thinking about it already? Adopting or—?”

“Actually, we’ve decided not to have any.”

Mary doesn’t miss a beat. “More power to you. They’re more than a handful. But you just give me a holler if some time down the line you’re ever looking for a surrogate.”

It takes Mary a few seconds to realize Jack’s fallen behind, Bella skipping down the path and Mary carrying on as if it were the easiest thing in the world to say.

“You’d do that for us?” Jack says.

Mary levels her steady eyes at Jack. “You bet I would.”

“We’ll think about it, but don’t get too attached to the idea.”

But Mary just says, “What are friends for?”

* * *

He had been hoping the steady job would give Lily something solid to hold onto, but more and more he sees her come into the room with a large travel mug and bags heavy and purple under her eyes.

She is as cutting a journalist as ever, of course, and even more cutting when she gets off the air. She snaps at him, snipes at him, stares like she’s looking at his bones instead of at him.

He still leaves his phone face-up when he’s cooking, turns the volume up before he goes to bed, but Lily doesn’t call. He wakes up with a hundred emails and no new messages from his sister. There are a million other things to think about: grocery lists, home décor, daily chores, and, of course, all his work at the station, the shows he produces and the tidbits of administration that fall down the chain onto his shoulders. The world gets busier and busier.

One day, on the way home, Lily tells Jack, “You know, I’m thinking of moving to a new place myself. Smaller. Fewer memories of being an undergrad. Cleaner furniture.”

Jack feels a twinge, some yawning, unnamable loss, but he says, “Okay. What neighborhood?”

“Dunno. I had a roommate lined up, but you know how it is. She met me.”

“And you definitely didn’t try to scare her away?”

“Give me more credit than that.” Lily sighs. “She was sweet, soft-spoken, gorgeous. Too sweet, and definitely too gorgeous.”

“You could do with a little sweet in your life.”

“Read the room, Jack. She’s probably straight, which would make it really awkward, and I didn’t need her pity. She came in, had a look around, opened all the cabinets, and, God, the place looks like a bachelor pad no matter what I do. And I thought, you know, that sweetness is only going to last so long. Might as well put it out in the open.”

In the subway, the train screeches to a halt and the exodus pours out. Jack and Lily squeeze into the car, snagging two seats near the door.

“So you put on a show,” says Jack.

“I put on a show.”

“I know your love life is none of my business—”

“It isn’t,” she says flatly.

“But speaking of shows, the show is my business, and I’m worried about you. If it’s too frequent, if you need longer to put together your stories…” Jack puts his arms around the bag on his knees, swaying with the subway car’s momentum.

“You know as well as I do that if it were any less frequent, the stories would be old news.”

“It’s just that you come into work looking like you’ve just pulled an all-nighter,” says Jack.

Lily laughs, voice low but brash. “Your schedule says once a week, but my schedule says the story never sleeps.”

“Not the best pun I’ve ever heard out of your mouth, but I’ll take it.”

She bares her teeth, but the shuddering of the subway car takes away from its threat. “You’d better.”

“Are you sleeping? Like, at all?”

“Are you counting the power nap I take an hour before hauling ass over here?”

“You’re gonna burn yourself out.”

“Not a chance.”

The subway doors open and she gets off without a word, two stops from her place. Jack follows her just as the door begins to close and has to run up the steps to reach her. At night, the city is brighter than the day, but it takes a moment for him to recognize Lily’s back, halfway across a street with the _wait_ symbol lit. A car beeps at her and she flips it the bird.

He catches up, his bag thudding against his body. Even this late out, it’s warm enough that Jack wears just a t, his jacket tied around the bag’s strap.

Lily stares straight ahead and says, “You’ve done what you can, Jack, and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful. It’s much better than sitting in my bedroom.”

He is trying to trust her to hold her pieces together, but he is seeing more and more cracks. “You know, most people want to be seen and understood when they’re depressed.”

“I know the symptoms of depression, and I’m not depressed.” She flings her arms out and spins around to face him, walking backwards down the sidewalk. Her unzipped jacket spreads like red wings under her arms. “Look, we’re fine, Jack. We’re well into our twenties and can stand on our own, and we don’t need to live like we’re kids anymore, clinging to each other with our claws out, mostly at the world but sometimes at each other.”

Passersby duck around her arms, shoot glares at Jack. But Jack is watching the way the streetlights catch in Lily’s hair and across the fabric of her jacket; he is watching her feet, the swagger with which she backtracks.

She calls into the night. “I’m fine. I’m great. I’m getting shit done. I have a wonderful job as a real broadcaster, produced by someone I’d trust my life to, and I’m doing work I’m proud of.”

 _I’d trust my life to,_ Jack thinks. Yeah, right.

Haltingly, Jack says, “It was always easy in my head, to be everywhere at once.” To balance everyone he cares about, to hear them out, to let their words spin circles around his heart. To be Lily’s, Sammy’s, his own.

Lily laughs. “Jack Wright, always playing the middleman.”

“A hell of a high school legacy, huh?” he says, heavy.

“I know. You’re standing on your own two feet, now, and I’m proud of you. I really am.”

Jack slips his arm around Lily’s, and she doesn’t brush him off. She turns around and rests her head on his shoulder, and they walk like that to Lily’s front door.

“Try not to worry about me,” she says as she puts the key in the lock.

“Come over for dinner tomorrow,” Jack says.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll see about it.”

But Jack comes home the next night and finds her and Sammy snacking on cheese and crackers, her jacket and shoes off.

“If it isn’t my two favorite people,” he says in lieu of hello.

And Sammy says, "Welcome home."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adapting a romcom where people go right after what and who they want for a couple of guys who're canonically engaged but still in the closet was very difficult, but I think I found a solution that stays true to KFAM (and About Time).
> 
> It's baby's first Sammiversary so here's a chapter in celebration!

It’s pushing 92 outside and their apartment doesn’t have internal A/C, so Jack and Sammy roll up the living room rug and lie on the naked floor in just their jeans. The fan in the window blows over their sweat-damp chests, but even that hardly cools them off. The sun pours hot against their building, all the way through the apartment to reflect off the kitchen appliances.

The summer breathes its last hot breaths over Manhattan.

Even the old cat has taken to lying in pools of shadows or sitting for hours in front of her water bowl. She’s gone from old to older. From where Jack lies now, he can just reach her flicking tail. He doesn’t touch Sammy, apart from brushing the sides of hands, because the heat is overwhelming enough in his own skin.

Sammy keeps sneaking sideways glances at Jack, then raising his eyebrows at Jack as though Jack is the one with something on his tongue.

“Okay, spit it out,” Jack says after about fifteen minutes of this.

“If we’re gonna have a kid, we’ll need a bigger place.” Sammy says it casually, but he’s turned his face away from Jack. Even his hair is deep in shadow.

Jack says, “Sammy, I couldn’t live with myself if you agreed to this just to please me.”

“I’m not,” says Sammy, but it takes too much effort to speak in this heat. They pant with the exertion of conversation.

“What changed?” asks Jack, finally

“I…” says Sammy, and falls silent, as though his voice can only manage one hurrah. Jack stretches his hand out and touches Sammy’s, touches the wedding band on Sammy’s finger. Despite the city hot as fire, the band is cold against their skin.

Sammy says, “There’s something you said when you asked me. And I didn’t, I—I couldn’t believe you’d trust me. I’m me, you know?” His voice borders on helpless. “But it’s love, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” says Jack softly.

Sammy closes his eyes, his lashes long and pale in shadow, and his hand twitches in Jack’s. The inches between them aren’t inches, aren’t centimeters, aren’t anything but a space for love to fill.

Sammy speaks like it’s a revelation, labored and careful. “I kept thinking about it in terms of the family I had. I thought… my family was _my_ family no matter where I went. I’d always be a part of it. But you’re my family, you’re… the best family I’ve ever had.”

Jack props himself up on an elbow to look at Sammy, beautiful even with his face drawn in the effort to explain himself. Sammy looks up at him with soft eyes, lifts a hand listlessly and lets it fall.

“So it’s you,” Sammy says. “You changed things. You’re the family that matters to me. If I could give someone a family that is good, and full of love, and everything I needed as a kid that I didn’t know I needed but saw at friends’ houses, with you, I think that’s reason enough.”

“It is,” says Jack, reaching out to stroke Sammy’s cheek.

“And I’ll have you with me at every corner, you keeping me the man I want to be. And I’m not my parents.” And it doesn’t matter, that phone call long ago, Sammy’s parents trying to insert themselves back into Sammy’s eyes and leaving him shuddering, in tears on the kitchen floor, holding onto Jack like a lifeline.

“You were never going to be,” says Jack. “We’re never going to be perfect, none of us. The wonderful part is that we get to keep trying. I watch you wake up and try, every day, to be a better man than you ever thought possible, and you are. Good, and wonderful, someone I am proud to call mine.”

They fall into silence, smiling. Sammy pulls Jack back down and adjusts to rest his head on Jack’s chest, heavy and warm. He breathes deeply, while the end-of-August heat falls over them.

“Jack,” says Sammy at last, and Jack feels it rumble through his ribs, feels Sammy’s breath hot through his t-shirt. “Why do you want a kid?”

“Because I love you,” Jack whispers, “and I want to give you the world.”

* * *

Mary is, of course, thrilled by the decision. Sometime well after Halloween, Jack invites her over, and she brings the whole family. The adults settle around the dining room table while the kids start an intense game of The Floor Is Lava in the living room. Sammy hasn’t yet taken down the paper bats on the ceiling, and Bella can almost reach them if she jumps on the couch.

Over Little Tim’s shrieks as he slips off the coffee table for the third time, Jack is saying, “I know you were thinking much later, and it can be much later, I want to at least have an anniversary first, but we wanted to bring you up to speed anyway. And… to give you space to tell us what you want.”

And the conversation goes late into the evening, until the kids’ bedtime creeps up on them. At the far end of the table, Sammy has the best view of the living room. Jack is watching the expression on Sammy’s face, the way his eyes track the kids’ movements.

“Ugh, that’s what we’re signing up for,” says Sammy, but he’s grinning.

“You’re gonna love it,” says Jack.

“Don’t hold your breath,” Sammy grumbles, and they all start laughing.

* * *

The winter months see their pantry filled with cans and their freezer with frozen vegetables, their bodies adorned with heavy coats, scarves, ski-masks to get through the harsh New York blizzards. When they come home, Sammy strips off three sweaters of decreasing bulk and turns the heat up. It’s a snowy winter, and they leave wet footprints on the hallway floors, in the elevator. 

They go through an obscene amount of hot cocoa a week. They are lethargic at home, where there is no difference between the overhead in the day and the bedside light in the night to remind them of the day.

It gets dark earlier and earlier, so that Sammy starts leaving for work in the dark and Jack starts leaving at sundown. The clouds hang low over the city, reflecting the ever-present streetlights and the high beams of tourists in cars they can’t park, skidding on black ice. Even the subway is a refuge from the biting cold, with its mass of bodies sweating under winter coats.

They dig all of Jack’s Christmas decorations out of the hall closet, and Sammy wraps tinsel all around Jack until Jack falls over dramatically. He and Sammy spend three hours picking out a tabletop tree in gloves and hats, for the joy of being married and choosing their very first Christmas traditions. They set the tree on the coffee table and cover it in ornaments: this a felt picture frame from elementary school with Jack and Lily’s faces grinning and gap-toothed, this a gift from a friend in college, this his mother’s, these a set from the Bronx Zoo.

“They’re yours, now,” Jack tells Sammy. “It’s all yours.”

And the place seems like something new, something young and bright and more than the sum of both of their lives. Jack keeps looking for this shape of this thing in Sammy putting window stickers on all the windows, in the gingerbread house on the dining table and the kitchen spread with measuring cups and cookie trays, in their bed, now a queen, laden with blankets and their bodies hot underneath.

They watch the ball drop in Times Square, tipsy and dizzy with the coming year and the on-screen neon. Jack forces his eyes to stay open, but when midnight hits, they kiss until the sky turns grey.

The winter goes, but the snow keeps falling all like sugar over the flowers pushing up in parks or on balconies. The clouds keep hovering low around the skyscrapers, reflecting like icing off their windows.

Sammy pares down his layers slowly, cautiously. Jack recites, “In like a lion, out like a lamb,” over breakfasts, and Sammy says, “Have you seen the weather out there? In like a lion, out like a tiger, more like.”

“Sure, a fluffy baby tiger.”

“There’s no use talking to you,” Sammy laughs.

Jack adjusts the succulents in the windowsill to get the most light. The cherry trees start to blossom on the walk to work, their browns turning to gentle candy pinks and whites. He circles a date in his calendar, and then he sticks a post-it note on the fridge with the date written in heavy ink.

When Sammy sees it, he calls across the apartment, “Who’s forgetting?” And Jack knows immediately what he means.

On the way home from work the day of their anniversary, Jack stops by the florist for a bouquet that stretches from one shoulder to the other. Lily laughs at him, of course, but it’s a kind laugh. She keeps poking her head into the bouquet to smell it, so he eventually tears off a blossom and gives it to her.

“If you wanted flowers, too, you should have just told me,” he laughs.

“Oh, yes, watch him go, my brother, buying flowers for his husband and also his sister, because she pouted.”

“Shush, you.”

“I’ll buy my own flowers,” she informs him.

“Good. You need something nice-smelling at your place.”

And Lily goes dark, but she pulls Jack in quick for a suffocating hug before she lets him go, there on his front step, the night pulling away from him the way Lily does.

It is only later that he wonders why.

Inside the apartment, the air smells like steam and chicken sizzling on the stove and the clean coconut scent from the shower.

“Sammy?” Jack calls softly, doing a juggle with the flowers and the keychain and his shoes.

Sammy comes out of the kitchen with an apron on and damp hair, shaking newly-washed hands, and Jack holds out the bouquet.

He watches Sammy’s eyes crinkle up in a smile he can’t contain. “Jack,” says Sammy, voice thick. Sammy’s eyes look like the ocean at night, speckled with light. With lights, because Sammy is crying.

“Sammy,” says Jack.

“You brought me flowers,” Sammy says, helplessly.

“Oh my God, of course I did, Sammy. It’s our _anniversary_.” The wonder of it on his teeth, the shape of it in the air, the way it tugs at one corner of Sammy’s mouth.

“I…” says Sammy, and he’s beaming and crying, his face glistening and his white teeth exposed.

“C’mere, c’mere,” says Jack. He reaches out and pulls Sammy close to him, and doesn’t even care if their chests crush the flowers. Sammy is kitchen-hot, and his back shakes under Jack’s hand.

“Here’s to one happy year,” says Jack, “and many more to come.”

“To a lifetime of happy years. A hundred happy years,” says Sammy.

* * *

So it is much later when they finally arrange the meeting with Mary, late spring or early summer, glittering silver New York turning green from the ground up. Kids run up and down their block on scooters, skateboards, miniature bicycles.

And after the decision, they see a lot of Mary and Tim. Bella, now seven, has decided that Jack and Sammy are her uncles, and nobody corrects her. The first time, Sammy asks Mary, “Is that okay?” And Mary says, “You might as well be.”

And when Jack gets the call from Tim, early February, he’s making phone calls to arrange interviews. He has to drop the call on hold, because Tim is saying, “Hurry and you’ll make it before the baby’s born.”

The whole way to the hospital, Jack can barely swallow around the pounding of his heart.

The doctor lets Jack and Sammy in while the baby is being weighed, still nameless.

While Mary holds the baby, the nurse brings in a few more chairs. Jack can’t sit still. He tries not to pace for Mary’s and ends up jiggling his leg in place.

“Sammy, Jack,” says Mary, after some time. Her voice is quiet, but it commands attention. Jack turns, and Mary is smiling from her bed, tired but her eyes still alight. “You ready to hold her?”

Even swaddled as she is, the baby is so small, and she fits perfectly between Sammy’s forearm and chest when he takes her from Mary’s arms. Sammy shakes so hard that Jack reaches out to steady him, but then they’re both shaking. Jack starts laughing first, something soft that catches in his throat. The baby blinks at them, her eyes blue as Sammy’s, paler, wide and questioning, and gurgles a laugh-sound. Everything about her is perfect: her nose, the wisps of damp hair, the chubby fingers scratching at Sammy’s shirt.

“Hey,” says Sammy, so softly Jack only hears him because he feels the breath shake Sammy’s shoulder. Jack glances up, and Sammy is beaming like there’s a whole sun behind his teeth, like he’s never smiled in his life. “Hi, sweetheart.”

The love in Sammy’s voice, his eyes enthralled, his arms wrapped so securely around her.

Jack is beaming himself, pressing close, reaching out a finger to touch the baby’s chest. The child, his child, his wonderful, remarkable, perfect child, reaches up and fumbles to grasp his pinkie finger. Her fingers move aimlessly in an unfamiliar world, but her digits curl tight around Jack’s finger. With his other shaking hand, he traces her knuckles. She’s real, and alive, and a person, a brilliant living person in this world, and he’d never been able to imagine how it would feel to hold her.

Sammy sniffs. Jack looks up and sees Sammy’s cheeks damp, his eyes dark and brimming. He reaches up and wipes Sammy’s damp cheeks with his thumb, so when Sammy glances at Jack, his eyes are shining, his mouth parted.

“Your baby,” whispers Jack.

“Our baby.”

They hold their daughter as long as they can, one and then the other, marveling at the size of her, the weight of her, the miraculous lucidity in her hour-old eyes. Against Jack’s chest, she is soft and warm and so terribly, unutterably small. They hold her long into the night, long after any other guest would be asked to leave, in the room the doctors moved Mary into. After a couple of hours, Tim takes the car to pick their kids up from the friend he left them with and put them to bed, and Mary keep watching them with this smile on her face that Jack is newly able to understand.

“I know you two boys are going to take good care of her,” Mary says.

“We will,” whispers Jack, and it’s a promise to Mary, to Sammy, to the girl in his arms with eyes blue as Sammy’s and all her own.

“And yourselves,” says Mary, as if she knows something they don’t.

* * *

They name the baby Posy. A few months after she comes home, the crib squashed into the corner of the bedroom already cramped with the queen bed, Jack and Sammy sign a lease on a two-bedroom uptown, in a neighborhood where the apartments stretch from the front of the building and the back. Suddenly a space which was big enough for both of them to build their life has too many corners, too many cramped spaces overflowing with keepsakes. Not enough room for the life they will lead.

They want a place with a bathtub, a bathroom they can fit into with room between their shoulders to hold another body, space enough for two wardrobes in the same room.

One day Larchmont. One day the Long Island Sound, parks wide enough for a kid to learn to ride a bike on and schools without waiting lists, suburban streets lazy with sun and heavy with laughter, where they could lay out hotdogs for block parties and chalk for the children. A place that could feel like a community. Like a home.

But they work in evening radio in the city, and there are too many things to consider—daycare, trains to Grand Central—so Jack writes _Larchmont: 5 Year Plan_ on a piece of paper and puts it on the fridge.

Paraphernalia builds up in the hallway, in the living room, in the corners of the kitchen. Sammy stubs his toes on something once a day, and Posy is young enough that they can still curse.

The old cat takes to watching Posy with her body tensed. She reaches up for the crib and stretches one paw between the slats, and tolerates it when Posy fumbles for her paw. The cat curls up at the foot of the crib or at the edge of the bed, looking up with wild eyes when Jack or Sammy comes in, and she rises when they lift Posy. Sometimes Jack picks the cat up and carries her like the baby, on her back, and bursts into laughter when she starts to purr.

They start looking for daycares early, because the waiting lists could span the city.

They pack all their things up, a huge hassle just to move across town, and fill the bedrooms back up with clothes and furniture first. It is familiar, this moving-in, except this time, their baby laughs in the crib in the corner of the living room while they unpack, and Sammy keeps catching Jack’s eye with this helpless smile on his face.

And one day, a few hours after they’ve fallen asleep, Jack’s phone rings. Grimacing, Jack fumbles for the bedside table, the ringtone going on and on, louder than anything he’s ever heard. The caller ID reads, _Mom._

“What is it?” Sammy mumbles. “’S too early.”

“Nothing, it’s nothing, shh,” Jack says. He puts the phone to his ear, slides out of the covers, and tiptoes into the other room, closing the door carefully behind him. The night is close, still, silent. He forces his eyes to stay open.

“Jack?” his mother is saying from very far away. In the dark, he can imagine her sitting at the kitchen table in their old house in Los Angeles. He turns on the reading light.

“Hi, Mom,” he whispers. “Is everything okay?”

She hiccups. When she speaks, her voice is urgent. “Jack, I just got off the phone with NYPD.”

His throat goes cold. “What… what happened? We’re not in trouble…? I don’t have any missed calls.”

“It’s Lily.” Her voice is studded with panic.

His whole body goes still. “Lily? She’s not hurt, is she?”

“She’s not hurt. They told us she was picked up for… she was out in Central Park after hours, drunk, they said…”

“Fuck,” says Jack softly. He gets up and paces the room, tiptoeing around the baby’s toys, pushing them to the side with his toes, his heart thudding so hard it scares him.

“Wheeling around, screaming at the stars, resisting arrest. Can you check in on her, see what they’re charging her with? Get her home? It’s so hard to be so far away from you two, especially when something like this happens.”

Jack’s breaths come too heavy, so he holds his hand over the receiver so his mother doesn’t hear. “Yeah, I’ll…” He fumbles toward the front hall to pull on his sandals. “I’ll go immediately. Where have they got her?”

His mother tells him, then she says, “Has she been… okay? I know you moved out a while ago, but you two have always been thick as thieves, so if anyone would know, it’d be you.”

“She’s had her bad moments,” says Jack. “And I don’t think they’re all alcohol-related.”

Her voice is resigned, the panic still woven through it. “Not reassuring, but not entirely unexpected, either.”

“Look, I’ll call you back when I’ve got her. Love you, Mom.” And he tiptoes back into the bedroom.

“Sammy,” Jack says, voice sharper than he intends as he opens his closet for a sweater to pull over his pajama shirt.

Sammy looks at him with bright eyes. “I heard.”

Jack’s breath shudders. He takes his wallet off the bedside table and flips through his credit cards. “Then you know that I have to go, right now. We have enough for bail, right?”

“She’s in jail?” Sammy demands.

“Look, I’ll fill you in. Can you take the kid?”

Sammy sits up, his eyes clear. “I’m going with you.”

Jack shrugs. It might be more than Jack can handle to bring Lily home.

But it takes longer than Jack can bear to dress Posy, so Sammy agrees to meet Jack at the police station. Jack sprints to the subway; he practically presses his body against the doors the whole way, and sprints the rest of the way to the police station.

Sammy meets Jack and Lily outside the station, Posy’s head poking over the baby carrier on his chest. Jack has one arm around Lily’s shoulders and a wallet ten times emptier from posting bail.

He sat and listened to the details of her probation while Lily tied her shoes over bare feet. Officer Krieghauser, with his sweet, slow, small-town accent, made all the concessions he could for her, but the law’s the law.

“What was her blood alcohol content?” Jack asked.

And they told him.

“You’d better know a hell of a hangover cure,” Jack is telling Lily as Sammy comes into focus. Lily whacks him with the long sleeve of her jacket, slung off one shoulder. Jack looks at Sammy and mouths, _Thank you._

“Only the best,” claims Lily. “Hey, Sammy. Well, if I’m in the clear now, I guess we can all just go home.”

“Oh, no,” says Jack, “you’re coming home with us.”

Her voice goes flat in a second. “I can handle myself.”

Jack says, “Don’t even try to give me that. Clearly you can’t, Lily, right now, given that I’m picking you up at the police station in the middle of the night.”

In the mid-autumn chill, the first fallen leaves gathering around their feet to sweep down the avenues, sweat begins to dry cold on Jack’s skin as they walk. He holds Lily until she shrugs his arm off, then he takes her hand. Sammy walks a few paces ahead, giving them the illusion of nighttime privacy. They are not the only people on the street, but their voices are loud enough that they attract every eye.

Jack says, “Lily, what were you doing wandering around at three in the morning disturbing the peace?”

“The popo told you, didn’t they? ‘Drunk and disorderly conduct.’”

“I know what you were brought in for. I’m asking why.”

“Can’t a girl go out on her own time?”

Jack swings their linked hands. “Well, that’s the thing. You’re not really a going-out-to-bars-alone kind of person.”

“I’m whatever I want to be,” Lily says.

“I want to hear it from you.”

“I wanted… Jesus, Jack, don’t you know it’s not polite to pry?” But he watches her with silent, even eyes until she keeps going. “I wanted to be somewhere real, not bullshit fluorescent concrete _fake,_ not some place full of city people with their city eyes, watching me, trying to see through me, just… grass everywhere. And a real sky.”

“I don’t understand,” says Jack. “You’ve been in New York since you were eighteen.”

“There weren’t any stars then, either,” Lily continues. There’s a hyperlucidity to her words that unsettles Jack, that pulls the night down closer around his shoulders. “I find something real, then maybe I’m something real. You follow?”

Her laces keep coming untied, and every time she stops to tie them, Sammy gets further and further away.

Once, when she stops to make another single knot, Jack says, “So you took your shoes off.”

“Left ‘em at the entrance, so I dunno how the cops got them. Didn’t get my socks, though, which means they’re going to smell something awful tomorrow morning.”

They take the elevator to Sammy and Jack’s. Lily hesitates at their front door, staring at it like it’s unfamiliar, like it’s a marvel.

“You can help me make dinner tomorrow,” Jack informs her.

While Sammy puts the kid to bed, Jack pulls out the futon. Lily sits on the dining room table with her shoes on the rug beneath her and says, “Any boyfriend of yours who comes to see your fucked-up sister home from the big house is a keeper.”

“Husband, Lily. You’ve never visited us at the new place, have you?”

“Damn. I guess not.”

Jack plunks their spare comforter at Lily’s feet and stretches the covers over the futon. “I can’t figure out you, Lily. I mean, fuck, you were my best man. You gave this horrible, embarrassing speech at the restaurant. You said you loved me.”

“I do love you, kid,” she says without missing a beat.

When the sheets are tucked in, Jack hops up on the dining table beside Lily and puts the comforter around them. She rests her head on his shoulder. Jack breathes and focuses on the way his shoulders rise with Lily’s, her body rocking as she swings her feet in empty air.

After some minutes, Sammy comes out into the main area, eyes heavy, and sinks onto the edge of the futon.

“Thanks for coming with us,” Jack says. “The kid in bed?”

“Yeah, dropped off like a rock,” says Sammy, and there is a fondness deeper than the ocean in his eyes. “Do you guys… want some time?”

“I think so,” says Jack.

Sammy kisses Jack’s forehead before he goes, his footsteps quiet, the door closing softly behind him. It is so easy to have a home in Sammy. Jack watches the door, watches the bedside light come on under the door, and then Lily shifts on his other side.

The living room things rise like mountains around the futon: houseplants, jackets hung over the bookcase, toys and stroller tucked into the corner for the night. All the paraphernalia of the little life he’s building, in shadows and gentle shapes in the early morning.

Jack pulls a dining chair over and rests his feet on it. He shivers.

“Have you found a roommate yet?” Jack asks when he turns back to Lily. “I don’t think living alone is your best option right now.”

Lily’s voice is cagy when she says, “I’ve been shopping around.”

Jack takes a moment to read the room, to calculate how gentle his love has to be. “You do have the place, though?”

Lily is silent.

Jack says, “But you’re coming into work. You haven’t taken a single sick day.”

“Yeah,” says Lily defensively. “I just had a disagreement with the landlord, and, bam, that was it. I have friends, but I didn’t want to worry you.”

“You’re couch surfing?” Jack hazards.

“What of it? It’s my life to screw up as I please.” It’s typical Lily vitriol: hit first so you don’t get knocked down. Turn your knuckles into fists to face the thing that’s trying to eat you.

But the thing trying to eat her has always been herself.

“Lily, Lily, Lily.” He sighs. “We’re well past that. Ever since I got a call from Mom about a call she got about you, well. I may be your kid brother, but I’m… It’s up to me to look out for you, too. I know this place isn’t much, it’s just a sofa in the living room, but it could be yours.”

Lily laughs and it shakes Jack, shakes the blanket around them. “I’m not living with my kid brother and his husband.”

“I want it to be your place. Serious,” says Jack.

“I can’t believe I missed your whole life.”

It hits Jack like a fist to the stomach. When he can speak, he says, “I called and called, Lily.” He hates the way his voice sounds, thin and helpless.

“I changed my number,” says Lily.

The silence builds up like an empty harbor. “What?”

“I changed it in the records at the station, too, but I didn’t…” Her voice grows thin, a scramble. “I guess you didn’t check, because I would have told you. But my landlord had that number, and Pippa.”

“You can block numbers, Lils.” It’s an old nickname, one that’s hung on since middle school, when Lily was dark-eyed and furious at every leaf that hit the ground wrong, while Jack tiptoed through the house like a deer.

“But I’d always wonder. I’d always be waiting. I’d… I’d know. I’d panic at every call.”

“I’d say that’s silly, but I don’t think you want to hear that right now.”

“Damn straight.” She tousles her hair, oily from uncounted unwashed days. And something changes in her expression.

“Do you remember…?” she says, her voice overly clear in a way that unsettles Jack. “Jeez, it was ages ago, before you got together with Sammy, before any of this shit went down. We were going to go to that escape room. You were so excited about it, but I told you it wasn’t my thing. Like, all morning.”

 _We went,_ Jack almost says, but Sammy is in the other room and that’s proof enough of the timeline he’s in.

“And then, at the last minute, like I was halfway out the door for work, you said, ‘Lily, let’s take a sick day.’ Do you remember that? ‘Let’s both of us take a sick day right now,’ like you had some sort of premonition, like you were trying to prevent something. The sort of premonition that keeps people from driving across a bridge when it breaks.”

“I remember,” Jack prompts.

“I was… jeez, do you think Sammy’s listening?”

Jack shakes his head. “I think he’s doing his best to give us privacy.”

Lily pulls her lips back, and it doesn’t look like a smile. “I thought… something was going to happen that day. I didn’t want to go to work; Pippa had been on my case for a month about my, and I quote, ‘abrasive persona,’ but really it was everything about me, and I’d fucking had it.”

“I feel like there’s more to it than that,” says Jack.

“Don’t you fucking patronize me, mister,” Lily snaps.

Jack looks at Lily straight-on, but it takes a long time for her to look back. “You’re not drunk, are you, Lily?”

“Use that big brain of yours and tell me.”

“Nah, you don’t sound it.” He says this without hesitation.

“Took you a while to figure it out. I’d say you’re losing your edge.”

And then it clicks. He says, “Oh.”

“Yeah,” snarls Lily.

Jack puts his arm around her. “Why, Lily?”

Suddenly she looks small, like the comforter around her is as heavy as the sky. “Why not? It’s what I’m best at, Jack, sabotaging things I love because I don’t deserve them, sabotaging myself when, God, when all I want is to be recognized as a phenomenal journalist.”

“You deserve them,” says Jack, “and you deserve to be happy and respected.”

“I don’t,” Lily tells him, as though that puts the end to it.

Something cold goes through Jack, something he doesn’t want to face. He says, “I was, you know. Trying to prevent something.” He glances down the hall, where the pale yellow glow of Sammy’s reading lamp seeps out from under the door. He speaks very softly. “There’s something I want to share with you, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

Lily levels her eyes at Jack. “Ominous and nonspecific, but I’ll take it. What is it?”

“I need you to promise.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, I promise.” His gaze is unflinching, so she says, much more solemnly, “I promise.”

He clears his throat, puts the words in order, opens his mouth. Opens his mouth again. “I can travel through time.”

“And they say I’m the one with problems,” Lily says.

“No, I’m serious, Lils, and I’m telling you now because I can help you. But it’s not like Movie Time Travel; I can only go back in my own life.”

“Sounds like you got the shit end of a bargain,” Lily says. “Why did I never know about this?”

“Because Dad told me to keep it quiet.”

Through the windows, the sky goes grey at the edges, the dawn coming gentle and cold. Lily pulls the comforter so tight around her that it slips off Jack’s shoulder.

“And,” says Jack, “because I didn’t want to tell you.”

Lily doesn’t miss a beat, but Jack can read the hurt in her voice. “Of course you didn’t.”

“I’d just turned twenty-one, and Dad told me over the phone. I didn’t believe him, because, time travel, are you kidding me? But I tried it, and it was true.”

Lily says, skepticism heavy in her voice, “What are you planning?”

“Do you know how you got here?” says Jack. He’s going for weary but it comes out rough. The idea started like a baby bird in the back of his mind, a fragile little winged thing, but it hovers over him now like a hawk.

“Duh. I fuck up everything I touch. I always have. I’m cursed with a cursed called ‘Lily Wright.’”

“I don’t mean you almost being thrown in jail here. I mean _here,_ you and me and this broken thing we call being siblings.”

Jack is afraid to look over when Lily stills beside him. He hears her breath, his breath, the muted shouts of people on the street, while the light pulls the dark around them like another blanket, heavier, more absolute.

“Not very sensitive of you,” Lily says at last. She is looking straight ahead out the window, her face in perfect profile. Jack watches her swallow.

And Jack knows he’s picking at a scab, knows the moment he says it, it’ll start bleeding all over again. Knows that if she sees, and makes the same choice, he might not be able to staunch it.

He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. He says, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Lily’s voice is flippant. “No idea.”

“I can show you.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so pleased to have this finished! It's the longest fic I've written to date!
> 
> Trigger warning for outing. It's only spoken of, but if you want to skip the scene that addresses it, that's the first scene; you can search "They step out into Posy’s room" to skip it.

Because Sammy is asleep in the master bedroom, Jack leads Lily into the baby’s room: the mobile hung slanted above the crib, the nightlight with stars, the baby monitor. Lily stares around the room, but Jack pulls the closet door open.

“I’m not getting in a fucking closet with you,” she hisses.

He whispers, “I’m gonna prove to you I can time travel.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lily says, but she steps inside.

So he goes back, but this time, he is holding Lily’s hands.

_Lily and Jack unpacking their college things in their first apartment, Lily laughing in the college radio station, Lily and Jack signing their first lease for an expensive studio off-campus. Lily wasted more times than he could count, coming home at five from nights out with friends, waking him up with her loudest voice; Jack texting Lily when the plane landed in La Guardia; Jack holding his high school diploma while his parents snapped pictures and Lily wasn’t there._

They rush past, days shared, but they’re all Jack’s days.

There isn’t a landing so much as a rushing in Jack’s gut, and he opens his eyes. The closet is dark, the thin lines of horizontal light falling across them, sweaters brushing their faces. They stand shoulder to shoulder, relaxing their hands. Lily is younger but not shorter, her hair falling to her shoulders, wearing a see-through top over a neon bra.

“Jesus Christ, it smells like a shithole,” says Lily. Her voice is higher, clearer, but the bitter rasp comes through regardless.

“Welcome to fifteen-year-old me’s bedroom,” says Jack, without apology. “Actually, welcome to teenage us.”

Lily looks at Jack, which means she can see him at fifteen, his hair longer on top of his head and wild, his shirt rumpled. But she says, “This is some sick prank, Jack Wright.”

“Wow, when they said you have to see it to believe it, they really underestimated the power of my sister to be pigheaded beyond belief. Go out and see for yourself.”

She pushes the doors open and they step out into his old bedroom. It’s dark, the overhead dim and his desk light off. There are piles of clothes scattered around the hamper, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with books, movie posters of cult classics on all the walls. A wide window occupies half of one wall, the house dug into the side of a hill so that he can see the ground just below eye-level.

A stab of embarrassment rushes through him, to see this place and to have her see it, now, like seeing his chest from the inside.

But Lily seems to have no problem entering the room, no problem adjusting to the shape of her body, already 5’10. She paces through the room slowly while Jack stands in front of the closet, not so much to guard it as to disguise the stiff chill in his limbs. His eyes prick. Somewhere upstairs, Mom and Dad pouring pre-dinner wine; somewhere upstairs, the end of his life.

He is watching Lily pick at her shirt, is watching the side of her face curl in disgust. He doesn’t have a mirror, but it’s dark out so she can see their faces in the window. There is a fear heavy in his gut, because he knows what’s coming this time.

“This isn’t how time travel works,” she insists, a hoarse edge to her voice. “We’re not supposed to be—teenagers. Christ, you look horrible.”

Jack’s hand rises to his face and he finds mud there, drying. “Skip to the believing me part, please. We’re in our own bodies, in our own lives. We can—we can change the past, Lily, we can change _ourselves_ in the past. Look, I just got home from rugby practice. I left my shoes in the middle of the front hall, and Mom got pissed. I remember these things, Lily. You want to know where it all began, all your shit, my shit, our shit? All this goddamn shit that got us so messed up? It’s here. Right here, right now.”

The alarm clock reads 6:54 p.m. It doesn’t give a date.

“I was in here crying,” says Jack softly to Lily’s back. “You’d just gotten your acceptance letter.”

Lily stills by the window, her body awash in light in front of the growing night. “NYU,” she says, her voice very faint. But it only takes a moment for her to regain composure, to filter the vitriol back into her words. “You fucking didn’t.”

Jack crosses the room and sits on the bed. He lays back and looks at his bare stucco ceiling, doesn’t look at Lily out of the corner of his eye. With its footboard, the bed is too small for him. He throws an arm over his face.

Lily says, “I’m not going through this. Take us back.”

It is everything he can do to keep his voice steady. “You know I don’t want to relive this. I want to get as far the _fuck_ away from this as I can. But I need you to remember all of it. You were upstairs, showing off your letter, and we were all happy for you.”

“Even you,” Lily drawls, and that’s when Jack knows she’s throwing up a front. They have never talked about this night.

“Yeah. Jealous, but happy. Because before you came back downstairs, we were okay.”

Lily laughs, and from behind, Jack can’t tell what kind of laugh it is. “I can’t remember either of us ever saying we were okay, and you just said you were crying. What was the point of bringing me here if you were just going to talk me through the whole thing anyway?”

“I have a point,” Jack says. “I’m getting to it. You don’t get to fuck this up again.”

“Well, then, get to it, because you are doing a hell of a job making me want to work with you.”

“You came downstairs and… well, we’d been having the fight since that morning. You were driving me to school and halfway there you stopped short, right in the middle of the road, and you said, ‘Get out, you’re walking, I’ve had enough of this.’ ‘This _bullshit._ ’ So I got out with my gym bag, but I left my backpack in your car.”

“That sounds like a lot of our fights,” says Lily.

There is a cold going through Jack and he doesn’t know how to make it stop. “No, it was new. It was the first time.”

The bed sinks as Lily sits on it, but she doesn’t touch his legs, and he doesn’t move his arm to look at her. He is almost a teenager again, frightened by the magnitude of his secret.

“How do you remember one day, what, ten years ago this well? Have you been here often?” Lily asks.

“No,” says Jack. “I couldn’t make myself touch it. But I remember it.” He remembers all the details: where he sat at the table, the food on his plate, the way his stomach churned and his throat seized up and he couldn’t look at any of them.

He continues. “I caught the bus home after practice. I brought the mail in, and you…”

“I thought it was a rejection,” Lily says, voice strained. “Of course I was tense.”

“You know what, Lily?” says Jack, strained and sharp. It doesn’t sound like him, high and harsh. He pulls his arm away from his eyes and half-sits up, fire in his ribs. “Keep your excuses out of it. The arguments weren’t easy on either of us, I know, and that’s why I kept my head down all through college, and I know I’m bringing bad memories up for you as well, but I’m trying to fix things. You want your feelings soothed? Fine, go upstairs and talk to them. I’ll wait. I’ll let you do it all over again.”

Lily presses her palms against the wall and touches her forehead to it, her hair parting around her shoulders.

Jack takes a deep breath. “It’s going to be different. I can’t go back before right now because you weren’t near me, and I need you… I can’t do it alone. Sure, I could have gone back in time and not told you I’m gay, because you’re gay and Mom and Dad didn’t need any more heartache, but—”

“Heartache,” repeats Lily, and Jack can’t read it. And he’s trying.

It’s like having the same argument all over again, Lily’s ferocity, Lily’s refusal to acknowledge the magnitude of the crime, to look at the damage head-on.

Or maybe she is afraid to look at what it makes her, coming out of her own mouth.

Jack says, “I went back and changed it, while we were living together in college. I thought I could fix things. I thought, if I’d done it differently, if I’d kept my mouth shut, things would be okay. But then I had to look at you every morning and know that you didn’t know the best part of me.”

“So you did nothing,” says Lily.

“So I did nothing.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” she decides. She shifts on the bed and her back brushes his legs. Upstairs, they hear cutlery clink, footsteps shake the ceiling. “Just make it so you tell me in college. That’s fine by me.”

Jack sighs. “I could barely live with you in college.”

“I’m getting mixed signals,” says Lily, her characteristic drawl less pronounced at seventeen but just as biting. She picks at the comforter, at the old blanket overtop.

Jack keeps his voice as flat and measured as he can. “Have it your way. Go upstairs and tell Mom and Dad I’m gay.”

“It did _not_ happen like that.”

“Lily, I’ve lived this day over in my head a thousand times. You didn’t have to live with it.”

“I did,” says Lily, and it sounds like the confession is being forced through her throat. “I know what I did to you. Even I couldn’t forget the worst thing I did to the most important person in my life.”

Oh. It hits Jack hard, and his vision goes out of focus, the way it does when he takes his reading glasses off.

Lily says, as though she can’t let the confession lie, “But I didn’t just flounce up to the dinner table and announce, Hey, Mom, hey, Dad, I have an important announcement to share with you about Jack. And they were supportive. They’d been coming around with me. I know—I was too out and it threatened them. Or scared them. But I had to be that—that vocal about it, that unapologetic, even though it fucked up my chances of being _happy_ with myself.”

“You think I was happy?” His voice is almost a whisper. “You think when I met Sammy I didn’t hate that I liked him? You think I wasn’t ashamed?”

He watches the defensiveness fall over her eyes. “I don’t know what you want from me. It’s in the—”

“In the past?” says Jack.

Lily looks at him, suddenly helpless. Suddenly wordless.

“It should have been my choice,” whispers Jack. “When to tell them.”

“It slipped out.” Something changes in Lily’s voice, something that takes her from defensive to almost pleading, apologetic.

Jack wraps his arms around his body and looks up at the ceiling. He hesitates to say the next thing, his body cold, aware of each shivering breath. “You did it to hurt me.”

“I was…” She speaks slowly, as though finding the words as she says them, uncertain in an uncanny way. “That’s what you think of me?”

“Your voice, Lily,” says Jack, by way of explanation. By way of saying, _When we walk through this door and up to that dinner table, I will hear your hate for me and it will break my heart all over again._ “The way your voice was.”

“I know. I knew. But I wasn’t trying to punish you. I wasn’t trying to put you in danger.”

“You should have thought,” says Jack. “I couldn’t be… like you. Loud about it. I couldn’t hold my own, Lily, and you knew that. You could make a place for yourself in this goddamn house, but I had to fight for every scrap I got.”

“Sports superstar Jack Wright couldn’t hold his own.” It’s an old, familiar bite in Lily’s tone. “Come on. You were the golden child. They loved you. I was high-maintenance and too much to handle. I ‘made a place’ out of necessity.”

“Lily, Goddamn it,” says Jack.

It pulls them both up short, the silence terse, Jack’s skin cold. Lily sighs. “I was… I felt horrible. I feel horrible. If it was me, I’d probably make your life miserable for the rest of your life.”

Jack gives a shaky laugh. “You kind of already got to that one.”

“Touché,” says Lily, but it’s shaky. She looks so young, her face rounder and her eyes draining of their fire. “You brought me with you so I could not say it.”

Jack nods.

Lily says, “So we go up and pretend to be fifteen and seventeen and fool our parents and I keep my mouth shut.”

“Pretty much,” Jack concedes. “You get us through tonight and we’re… we’re gonna be okay.”

They are looking at the shape of the rift between them, and it looks like four plates of pasta between them and cataclysmic fury in Lily’s eyes.

Instead, Lily takes Jack’s hand and squeezes. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Save it for after,” says Jack, when what he wants to say is, _Save it for yourself._ Things will be different, this time. So he whispers, his fingers moving under Lily’s. “Thank you.”

A knock comes at the door and their mother pokes her head in, looking almost the same as the last time Jack saw her, hair pulled off her forehead with a bandana, an oven mitt on one hand. She calls Lily to set the table.

Lily looks at Jack until he nods. And when their mother has left, the door open still, Lily says, “To being a better sibling.”

She gives a two-fingered salute and closes the door behind her.

* * *

They step out into Posy’s room, as dark as it was when they left, and tiptoe into the living room. Lily sits heavily on the futon covers and says, “Holy shit, that was real.”

“Doesn’t it feel better?” Jack prompts.

“It’s like I stopped knowing you before I left home,” she says, the marvel of it softening her voice. “Jesus, I hardly knew you at all.”

He doesn’t know what the past ten years have done to them, but he’ll have plenty of time to ask. “You do now.”

Silence falls companionably between them while the heavy orange sun peeks over the buildings behind him, reflecting off windows and across Lily’s hair.

Jack is dozing at the dining table when he thinks to check the time. “Ugh, Lily, it’s too late. Early. It’s too early. Go to bed.”

“I’m not stopping you,” says Lily, her brows furrowed, not quite focused on him, an expression he’s seen on himself in the mirror so many times as he tried to reorder the past. 

Jack says, “I can’t believe I have to babysit you. Go to bed. I’ll have Sammy wake you by three. We’ll be really quiet. It’s my turn with Posy, anyway.”

But when he turns on the bedroom lights, when he stoops over the crib, he sees a black-haired baby.

“Hello,” says Jack, very slowly, his breath like the winter around them. He reaches out to turn the baby’s head, to see if it’s just the angle, just the light. But the nose is different, the ears. It doesn’t have to open its eyes. “You’re not my baby.”

Through the open door, he hears the toaster pop up. Something heavy and wet rises in his throat. He steps away from the crib, and his mouth forms Sammy’s name.

It’s gone, in the heartbeat it takes to open a door: the past months, the move, the wonder, the dizzying bouts of laughter. Holding their child, spitting image of Sammy, in the hospital while Mary dozed; whispering Posy’s name while she looked up at them, uncomprehending; lullabies sung while holding her against his shoulder, warm and small and remarkable. The world given to Sammy, to him and Sammy, all gone.

He says her name, and the baby in the crib doesn’t stir.

The sun is rising, and, irrationally, Jack knows he has to make this choice before the light touches her.

He wakes Sammy up. Sammy’s eyes go immediately clear, and he reaches for Jack’s face. “What’s the matter?” Sammy says.

“Our baby,” says Jack. “She’s mine, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, I mean… he’s ours. I don’t understand, Jack, what’s going on? Is everything okay?”

 _He’s?_ It thrums through Jack like a breaker, cold and colder. Jack’s breath shudders.

“She’s—we—” Jack doesn’t know how to ask the question of biology, doesn’t know how to turn the loss into words Sammy will understand. His voice shakes. “No, no, yeah, everything’s fine. It’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

Sammy squints up at him. “You sure? You sound pretty shaken.”

Jack’s voice is almost a whine, and it scares him. “Sammy, I can’t do this. I can’t… fuck, I want it to be right, I want—Lily—God, I don’t know. I’m sorry if this was a better future. Go back to sleep.” He almost says, _Lily’s gonna sleep in, so I’ll leave a note on the fridge_ before he remembers he is not letting this timeline lie like a dog in the summer. He is not planning for a future here.

And when he closes the closet doors, he is praying to a God he hasn’t believed in since he was thirteen that he has not lost the ability, that time will still part around him like water for him to swim through. He closes his hands into boxers’ fists.

The closet is dark and he shivers. It smells vaguely damp and intensely of baby powder, but there is plenty of room for him to fit himself in. He clenches his fists and unclenches them, looks at the light falling in stripes across his hands.

She’s a real person, Posy, and he can’t take her future away. He can’t take her life.

All he has to do is go back and never tell Lily his family secret, never take Lily with him. All he has to do is do what he asked Lily to: shut his mouth and let time pass him by. In the dark, all he has is heartache before him and heartache beneath, but one he has learnt to live with.

“Do it,” he whispers to himself. “Just close your eyes and do it.”

He goes back. He has to. He goes back, everything he is losing rushing past him like a video in high speed slow motion. Lily is sitting on his dining room table saying, “I can’t believe I missed your whole life.”

Jack tries not to cry. He looks at her and knows it isn’t enough, knows that he can’t fix this, knows he can’t take her by the jaw and say _Look, this is where the hurt lies. Look, because I know you are not looking, and now I know why._

_The hurt goes down as deep in you as it does in me._

He has to rehearse the next thing he says, to lay it out like a staircase before him. He says, after the silence has become unbearable, “You can start now.”

When Lily looks at him, Jack is searching for vulnerability in her clear, dark eyes, some sign that he can reach her. She presses her lips tightly together, and absently pushes her hair back.

“There’s nothing I can do,” says Lily, but now Jack knows. “Do you think I haven’t tried? You don’t… I’ve been trying to reach you, and you’ve been throwing me out. I’m sick of clawing at the table legs for a scrap of bread.”

“I know,” says Jack.

“Of course I gave up,” says Lily.

And Jack says, “When?”

“You graduated college,” says Lily simply.

“Oh.”

“It is what it is.”

When he gets up to check on the baby, Lily pulls all of the comforter around her shoulders. He hesitates in the doorway, one hand on the light switch, and he feels it shaking. He takes a deep breath. She’s there, she’s asleep, she’s waiting for him just like he remembers her, Sammy’s ears and dimples all her own. He tells himself this; he holds it behind his eyelids.

And when he turns the light on, he sees Posy the way she should be, who he’s watched her grow into from the first moment he saw her, asleep and shadowed but full of light. And it is as miraculous as the first time he held her.

“Thank God,” Jack whispers. “Oh my God. Sweetheart. It’s you.” He reaches up and wipes his cheeks, but then the light falls like tear-tracks across his face.

It’s too early to wake her, but he stands and looks for as long as he can.

On his way back down the hall, Jack says to Lily, “Move in with us.” It is an offering, a white flower, something small and precious and new.

Lily snarks back, “Oh, yeah, sure. What will Sammy say?”

“If you want to stay up to ask him yourself, you can, but I promise it’ll be okay.”

Lily slides off the table and heads toward the kitchen, leaving the comforter in a pile. Jack picks it up and spreads it over the futon, not watching Lily, not wanting to watch her. Not wanting to know what he’s left with.

“I’m making a bagel,” Lily calls. “You want one?”

“Nah. I’m gonna eat at a normal hour like a reasonable person.”

Lily scoffs. “Suit yourself.”

And for a moment, it almost feels like they’ve changed the world.

In the kitchen, Jack can hear the crinkling of plastic, the drag of a cutlery across ceramics.

“Anyway,” Jack says, “it would be weird if Sammy and I were dating, but we have a family, here, and you’re family, too.”

“I’ll think on it,” Lily says.

“Well, you can crash on our couch until you make your mind up.”

“Whatever.” Lily comes out chewing on her bagel and falls back on the sofa. Jack studies her, chewing with her mouth open, her hair hanging in her face.

He says, “But you have to get your shit together. If you want to be in my life, really be in my life, you have to make some changes.”

He is expecting her to say, _Forget it,_ to say he’s not worth her pride. Lily raises her eyebrows for a long moment before she speaks. “Name your terms.”

So he does.

Jack takes a sick day, because he wants to see the shape of this thing, his family, in the light. Lily does fall asleep eventually, no more than half an hour before Sammy rises, which gives Jack enough time to call home.

It is frightening to dial their number in a way it hasn’t been since college, his feet in two worlds at once.

“Lily’s okay,” he tells his mother, after explaining, in brief, the situation at the station. It could have happened a lifetime ago, and he knows a thing or two about lifetimes. He breathes long before he says anything, steadying himself. “We’re watching over her. And I think she’s gonna start watching over herself, too.”

He stands in the bathroom with the door closed, opening and closing the medicine cabinet. The hurt is new again, and raw, warm as a hand held over a candle flame.

“You know we’re happy for you, right?” says his mother.

“Sure you’re not just happy about the granddaughter?”

His mother sighs, and it sounds like static. “Jack. You know that’s not fair.”

“Huh,” says Jack.

“We’ve always wanted you to be happy, and you and your sister feeding off each other’s depression and digging up each other’s hurts never helped with that.”

"I know, Mom. I know."

And when his father takes over, Jack says, without pause, “I can’t go back before the birth, can I?”

There is a patch of dead air, and then he hears his father’s intake of breath. “No,” says his father. “Babies are chance physics.”

And even though Jack shivers, even though the light seems farther away, he understands.

“So are lovers,” says Jack. “Everything is.”

“It’s hard not to change the world with a talent like ours.”

“I don’t want to change the world,” says Jack, realizing its truth as he speaks. “I want the life I have. I want to be happy with the people I love.”

His father says, “Then you’ve already learned the most important lesson of time travel.”

And yes, maybe it will never be okay. Maybe the damage goes too deep, and he is just as loathe to let go of it as Lily. But the world is bright and full of flowers, and if anything is going to change, it might as well be now.

Later, Lily still asleep at lunchtime and Sammy tending to a grilled cheese with the baby on his hip, Jack whispers, “This is what I have forever.” He stands in the kitchen doorway and glances slowly between them, the narrow walls of their two-bedroom apartments big enough to hold the world and more.

“What was that?” says Sammy fondly.

This is what he has forever: these people in any walls, this moment forward, this future. This simple, yellow happiness. Even though a thousand pasts have been locked to him forever, a thousand would-haves with their easier happinesses and kinder presents, the wonderful little life he’s built for himself with Sammy, with Lily, is worth it all.

Jack smiles a secret smile. “You, Sammy. And Lily. And the best kid in the world, and this day. I’m a lucky guy.”

* * *

So Lily moves in.

Even though Jack made the offer, his stomach drops when she accepts: grief for all the things he’s built with Sammy alone, for the many things unchanged, unspoken, untouched between him and Lily.

But Jack and Sammy help her carry her things from her friend Maggie’s, way downtown, her audio equipment a bit banged up but still serviceable. They pull essentials out of her storage locker, and within the week, the living room belongs as much to Lily as to Jack and Sammy. There is enough room around the futon, even when it’s pulled out, for the kid to play.

Lily is there when Posy takes her first steps. She is watching Posy while, in the kitchen, Sammy dries his hair from the shower. Jack, just home from a busy day, sits on Lily’s bed and unties his shoes.

Sammy watches fondly from the doorway, but glances away when Jack looks for too long. Finally, pulling his hand through his hair, he comes over. He sits down on the rug, drops the towel, and rests against Jack’s legs. Jack reaches down and squeezes Sammy’s shoulders.

And Posy stills, totters, rises, a waterfall in reverse. She surges up like a sunrise. She reaches out and Lily reaches back, reaches across Sammy to take her fingers, gives her just enough support that the baby takes another step.

“Wow,” whispers Sammy. He has frozen against Jack’s calves, his shoulders tense, knowing the momentousness of the moment but not knowing how to hold it.

“Come on, you,” says Lily. She takes Sammy’s hand and pulls it toward Posy’s. And then the baby, giggling, falls into Sammy’s lap.

Sammy murmurs, “Look at you, you did such a good job.” He looks up from Posy for just a second to catch Jack's eyes, and he is alight with stars.

“Never thought you’d be good with kids, Lily,” Jack says, but he is peering over Sammy’s shoulder at his daughter.

“Never thought you’d have one,” Lily shoots back, but she is aglow.

Lily is trying, even though the hurt runs deep in both of them. She doesn’t always look him in the eyes, but she makes the three of them midday coffee. She folds up the futon every morning until Jack tells her it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Despite his efforts, Jack still can’t convince her to call a psychiatrist, can’t always quell her flares of anger. When she snaps at Sammy, he sasses back without missing a beat. When she snaps at Jack, he doesn’t always turn away.

He is trying, too, not to shut her out. He is trying to understand her. She’s here, and maybe that’s a miracle.

They never expect her to pick up childcare duties, but she does. Many afternoons, when she stays home on her laptop, applying for day jobs, she keeps an eye on the baby and takes her to daycare so Jack can get into work without sprinting.

“You know, things are looking pretty okay,” says Jack one day. They are in a nearby park, Jack pushing the stroller with the canopy pushed down against the wind and a few grocery bags tied around the handles. The wheels crush limp flower petals, while the trees have begun to shed their buds for vibrant, vicious leaves.

If Lily was a season, Jack thinks, she would be summer: its violent greens, its open burn. Summer is coming early this year, sidewalks boiling before June, and already Jack and Lily are both in t-shirts.

“You think so?” says Lily, voice neutral.

“Why not?” says Jack. “I’ve got a wonderful family, and mostly we’re living well with each other.”

Lily looks at him sideways, as though trying to figure out what he means, then says, “Yeah, we are.”

“I don’t hate you, Lily.”

“Of course you don’t,” she say, with a bravado she uses for deflection.

“And,” says Jack, but the leaves catching the sun are dazzling and the shadows fall soft and dark over his eyes, and he almost doesn’t say it. “I forgive you.”

* * *

And later, the evening of their child’s first birthday, while Lily is wolfing down half the cake on her bed, Jack sits Sammy down on theirs and says, “I don’t want to scare you, but there’s something I want to tell you.”

The window is open, and spring’s sharp breeze cuts through the bedroom. Jack traces circles across Sammy’s hands.

“Okay,” says Sammy.

“About me,” says Jack. “About my family. A coming clean. I should have told you, but—I was afraid, I guess, or not really _guess,_ but.” Jack wets his lips and looks at Sammy helplessly. “I’m just gonna go ahead and say it, and you can tell me if it’s stupid and you never want to hear about it again.”

“Jack,” says Sammy, voice soft and fond, and it quells Jack’s nervous chatter. Sammy rests his hand on Jack’s cheek, and Jack melts into the touch. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, I’m not gonna hate you.”

Somehow it is just as scary to tell Sammy as it was to tell Lily, gut-lurching in a new way. There are too many choices he has to justify, too many lies he has to come clean about. But if he is going to do this, if he is going to live as honestly as he can with those he loves, they need to know.

“I know, I know,” says Jack. “It’s just… I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone.”

“Take your time,” says Sammy. “I’ve got the rest of our life to hear you out.”

“Yeah,” Jack laughs. “Our life. Our beautiful little life.”

Later, he can tell Lily. Later he can field her questions, can tell her why he left the past the way he did before he had no other choice, can give her his promises that he won’t change her life. But right now Sammy’s eyes are bluer than Jack has ever seen them, his hair hanging loose around his face, his legs crossed, leaning close enough to Jack to hold him.

So Jack tells him.


End file.
